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Students can come to school with a lot of baggage. They may be feeling the stress of financial pressure at home. They may be dealing with a death or illness in their family. But as school counselor Barbara Micucci puts it, “Ultimately it does not matter the issues that kids bring to school. Schools are charged with educating the kids.”
This is where she and other counselors come in. We recently spoke with Micucci about the counseling profession—why it is important, how it has changed over the years and the challenges it faces. She also told us about her own work and some of the strategies that led her to be named the 2010 School Counselor of the Year by Naviance and the American School Counselor Association. Key to her success: visibility, and a desire to engage parents as partners in the educational process.
Micucci has been a counselor for over 20 years and is currently working at Caley Elementary School in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. She was selected from a field of extraordinary school counselors across the country and plans to use her new role to call for strategies to ensure that every elementary school across the United States has a school counselor.
Why Have School Counselors?
Public School Insights: Let’s start with a very general question. Why is it important for schools to have counselors?
Micucci: It is so important for a number of reasons. I think kids today are under a lot more stress and family pressure than they have been in the past. There are many reasons. Families themselves are very stressed. A lot of it comes from economic conditions. And aside from that, when I think of my school—and I am in a middle-class school in a suburban district—there are a lot of families where parents are divorced. There are single parent families. There are parents who have adopted children. I have a couple families where there's terminal illness. More families are coming with limited English proficiency. There are families living with other families because of ...
As an organization, the Learning First Alliance is concerned with issues that relate specifically to k-12 public education in America. But as individuals, we are interested in most issues relating to education. So when I saw the recent New York Times article Share of College Spending for Recreation is Rising, I gave it a read. Times are tough—no one will deny that. And really? Colleges spending on recreation? Is that the best use of their funds, especially in times of fiscal crisis?
But my reaction to the article was likely not what the author hoped. Rather than a sense of outrage at the spending habits of higher education institutions, I came away concerned with how spending categories were portrayed and hoping a similar tone would not be used in discussions of k-12 budgets.
To quote from the article:
The trend toward increased spending on nonacademic areas prevailed across the higher education spectrum, with public and private, elite and community colleges increasing expenditures more for student services than for instruction, the report says.
Now, to me, “student services” does not equal “recreation.” And the very next paragraph explains: “The student services category can include spending on career counseling and financial aid offices, but also on intramural athletics and student centers.” To me, student services would also likely include things like mental health services, student health ...
Last night, I got some forty spam comments from essay mills. This sort of thing happens pretty often, but it's beginning to get under my skin. Do many college or high school students actually submit essays from these mills as their own work? How big is this problem?
I have no love for comment spammers in general, but these spammers strike me as especially dastardly. Take, for example, college-paper.org, which has flooded this blog with comments. The site's tag line is "Intelligence Made Easy," which pretty much sums things up.
The site makes no pretense of helping students with their writing, as some essay sites do. "Are you missing out on the things you want to do because you are working on your research paper?" the site asks visitors. Get someone else to do your work, because, golly, thinking for yourself is hard. So is acting with integrity. (And do college students really need to cut down on the hours they spend studying?)
And here's the kicker: All those spam comments? Plagiarized from other sources. ...
I'm getting more and more worried about the heated rhetoric of debates on school reform. This rhetoric is fueling a war without winners. Here's why:
The rhetoric of reform is killing the public school brand.
Too often, the rhetoric suggests that all public schools are schools of desperate measures, schools of last resort. The failing urban school has come to represent every public school. Some say public schools are impervious to reform. Others say they have capitulated to reform and become test prep factories. Public schools are battle grounds for ideologues of all stripes who attack them for straying from ideological visions of what is Good and Holy.
The message to parents of means? Get your kids out.
The rhetoric of reform is shrinking our vision for education.
The language of "high expectations" rings hollow when we consider just how little we expect of some reform models. The tests we use to measure our progress focus mostly on low-level skills. Subjects like world language are disappearing from the curriculum. Those who say tests don't measure everything that matters are sometimes derided as "touchy feely."
But visions that inspire us are by nature touchy feely. They push us to think well beyond our current impoverished measures. (Today, Jay Mathews praised a set of high schools that ...
An innovative program out of Boston College is making a big difference for children in 11 Boston elementary schools. City Connects (CCNX) works with the schools to link each child to a "tailored set of intervention, prevention and enrichment services located in the community."
Its efforts have gone a good distance towards closing achievement gaps between the low-income children in the program and children who meet state averages. CCNX's results offer powerful support for what should be common sense: When we address the challenges poor students face both within and beyond schools, they flourish.
A rigorous study (PDF) of the program's outcomes tells a pretty stunning story:
- The beneficial impact of BCNX [the former name of CCNX] on student growth in academic achievement (across grades 1 to 5) was, on average, approximately three times the harmful impact of poverty.
- By the end of grade 5, achievement differences between BCNX and comparison students indicated that the BCNX intervention moves students at the 50th percentile up to or near the 75th percentile, and the students at the 25th percentile up to or near the 50th.
- For multiple outcomes, the treatment effects were largest for students at greatest risk for academic failure. For example, English language learners experienced the largest treatment benefits on literacy outcomes, by third grade demonstrating similar report card scores to those proficient in English in comparison schools. In fact,as a result of BCNX, there was no longer an achievement gap between these students.
- After grade 5, the lasting positive effects ofthe BCNX intervention can be seen in middle-school MCAS scores. The size ofthe positive effect of BCNX ranged from approximately 50% to 130% as large as the negative effects of poverty on these scores.1
We recently caught up with two of the program's leaders: Dr. Mary Walsh, its Executive Director, and Patrice DiNatale, its Director of Practice.
Public School Insights: What is City Connects?
Walsh: City Connects is a systemic, evidence-based approach to school-based student support. It involves assessing, in conversation with teachers and other school staff, each child in the school at the beginning of the school year and then developing a tailored student support plan based on that student's strengths and needs in four areas: academic, social emotional/behavioral, health and family.
That support plan involves accessing services, supports, resources and enrichment for the child, both school-based resources as well as, and importantly, community resources. A trained professional with a Master’s degree—either ...
Kalamazoo Central High School in Kalamazoo, Michigan made news when it beat out thousands of other schools for the honor of hosting President Obama as its commencement speaker. The President will speak before the school's 2010 graduates today.
His audience will include scores of students whose lives have been transformed by a stunning promise: free tuition at any public university in the state. At a time when many towns in Michigan are losing people, the "Kalamazoo Promise" has drawn a flood of new families into the city and the school system.
We recently spoke with Von Washington, the principal of the high school, about the President's visit and what it means for the school. Buoyed by the Promise, students have been streaming into AP classes and graduating in higher numbers.
Their passion, academic focus and hope for the future come through loud and clear in a video they created to make their case to the President. It clearly hit home.
Public School Insights: Kalamazoo Central High School recently received a big honor. You won the Race to the Commencement. As a result, President Obama is going to give your commencement address. What do you think set Kalamazoo Central apart from all of the other schools that tried to get the same honor?
Washington: It is really tough to tell. We are not entirely sure. But there are a couple of things that are distinct about us. One is that in the video presentation we really believe the students, through their words and their passion, gave a good idea to those viewing the video of what it means to go to school at Kalamazoo Central High School and what it means to be serious about your education.
Second, we are not a school that, by any means, has arrived. But we are a school, and a school district, definitely on an incline. We are reaching towards the sky, and we are moving towards our goals. And because it can appear that education is kind of in the doldrums financially and/or in achievement, I think that people recognize that if you are ...
[First published April 22, 2008]
In a few days, a new and expanded edition of Richard Louv’sLast Child in the Woods, will hit bookstores around the country. Louv’s book has fueled an international movement to combat what he calls “nature deficit disorder,” children’s growing alienation from the natural world. (Louv’s term for the disorder is quickly catching on, turning up in major newspapers, on television, and even in a February cartoon by Bloom County creator Berke Breathed.)
A quotation from our recent telephone interview with Louv elegantly captures the thrust of his argument: “[T]he message we’re sending kids is that nature is in the past and probably doesn’t count anymore, the future’s in electronics, the boogeyman lives in the woods, and playing outdoors is probably illicit and possibly illegal.”
Development is choking off access to nature, kids are succumbing to the attractions of television
and computers, and—yes—time for school recess has dwindled dramatically in the past decade. To make matters worse, Louv argues, parents, educators, and even environmentalists have been complicit in erecting barriers to the natural world. We keep our children indoors to protect them from real or (very often) imagined dangers, we regulate and confine their play, and we tell them to not to disturb delicate flowers, quiet streams or pristine undergrowth.
Louv does find encouraging signs of change in the rapid growth of “Leave No Child Indoors” movements around the country. (Many movement leaders credit Louv’s book for greatly accelerating that growth.) Nature is far too elemental a human need, he argues, for Nature Deficit Disorder to grow unchecked. For an overview of "No Child Left Inside" initiatives around the country, see the Children and Nature Network.
Hear a recording of highlights from the interview (5 minutes):
Or check out the transcript below:
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: What, in a nutshell, is the central argument of Last Child in the Woods?
LOUV: The central argument is that you have an increasing pace in the last three decades, approximately, of a rapid disengagement between children and direct experiences in nature. And that this has profound implications, not only for the health of future generations but for the health of ...
Louisiana’s Greenlawn Terrace Elementary is a small school achieving big things. It is one of the top-performing schools in its district, a feat made even more impressive given the high rate of poverty of its student population. In fact, the school was recently named a High-Performing High-Poverty School by the Louisiana Department of Education, one of a very few neighborhood schools in the greater New Orleans area to receive the honor.
We recently spoke with members of the Greenlawn community to learn how they do it. Two major themes emerged: their school environment, which is caring and safe for students, parents and staff, and their focus on data.
Principal Katherine “Kitty” Croft, special education teacher and department chair Marguerite Hymel and Title I extension teacher Amy Lang told us more.
Public School Insights: How would you describe Greenlawn Terrace Elementary?
Croft: At Greenlawn, everyone in the school, from the custodial staff to the principal, shares the same vision.
I have been at the school almost 25 years, and that stability, of course, adds to what goes on here. And we are a small neighborhood school, with about 370 students. But when I first came, this was a large school. We were almost 700 children. I took home the yearbook so I could memorize the teachers. But now we are a small, suburban school tucked in Kenner, Louisiana, behind a very busy street. I love it.
Our population…When I first came to the school it was about 66% white, 33% black. Today it is about 41% white, 33% black and 25% Hispanic. We have always been a Title I school, which means that we are always “at-risk.” We have right now about 85% free or reduced price lunch students.
I have always loved psychometry. I figured when I was in graduate school that there would always be ...
I continue to be amazed by the fact that it has become taboo in some school reform circles to talk about strategies for clearing away non-academic barriers to student learning. Calls to address problems like hunger or poor health are often seen as excuses for poor schooling rather than as concrete strategies to improve the lot of children. This tendency strikes me as very counterproductive.
It's not the job of schools to ensure medical care and proper nutrition, we're told. It's not the job of schools to do what parents should be doing. Those are lovely sentiments. Many teachers and other school staff would probably agree that the job they thought they signed up for didn't involve finding health care for children, getting them warm clothing in the winter, or offering them breakfast when they're hungry.
But such expectations don't mean a whole lot when a child in your classroom can't concentrate because she has a tooth ache, can't see the board because she needs eye glasses, or is hungry because she went without breakfast. High-sounding talk about what a school's "mission" should or shouldn't be must ...
When the President's Blueprint for Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act appeared last month, Chuck Saylors was struck by what he didn't see: much attention to parent engagement. The President's budget proposal had already seemed to eliminate the Parent Information and Resource Centers (PIRCs), the only federal program devoted solely to parent engagement in schools. (The Learning First Alliance just released a statement urging a much stronger federal focus on parent engagement.)
Saylors recently told us about the National PTA's work to make parent and family enagement a national priority. Despite his disappointment with the Blueprint, Saylors is optimistic. The administration seems ready to listen, he told us, and the PTA is not about to let up on its fight for parents.
Public School Insights: What are the biggest legislative priorities this year at PTA?
Saylors: There are several things on the agenda, but I am going to say that the reauthorization of ESEA is probably the issue of the day for us. We want to make sure that ESEA is reauthorized in a timely manner and we want to do everything that we can to get parents involved in the process. There are a lot of components to the legislation that need to be addressed, and we want to make sure that a parent voice is at the table.
Public School Insights: Is your sense that the blueprint the Obama administration offered for this reauthorization included the parent voice?
Saylors: I have to admit that I'm very disappointed that it was not more direct in including parental engagement. There are some brief references, but as the leader of the PTA I can tell you that I am very disappointed in the fact that there's not more concrete reference to parental engagement in the blueprint.
That being said, I have to publicly admit that PTA does have a good working relationship with the administration and we are very thankful for that. But this is ...
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