Proud Foundation

5/31/2006 7:05:14 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Professors Find Preschool Benefits Grossly Exaggerated A Rand Corporation study that claims universal preschool will deliver $2.62 in benefits for every dollar spent by California taxpayers has been thoroughly discredited by two San Jose State University economics professors who show the Rand preschool study "cherry-picked" data, based its claims on "unbelievable assumptions that bias the results," and omitted numerous costs and other factors that significantly lower the alleged benefits of universal preschool. The review of the Rand report, published by the Reason Foundation, uses Rand's own data and methodology and finds that California would actually lose 25 to 30 cents for every dollar spent on universal preschool when just a few of the Rand report's most glaring mistakes are corrected. And the Reason study concludes those losses would be even greater if many of the proposed preschool program's costs, wrongly excluded from Rand's calculations, were included in the analysis.
5/30/2006 8:47:06 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Low-cost education providers see a world of opportunity This is mega-cool. I wish this could happen with our K-12 education too. It could happen if the government got out of the way and let free enterprise do it's magic & let our kids learn at their own rate. Gerald Heeger is a newcomer to Texas, but he isn't afraid to set Texas-size goals. In five years, he wants his company, Whitney International University, to enroll more than half a million students around the world and be on its way to becoming the biggest provider of higher education the Earth has ever seen. "How's that for audacity?" Dr. Heeger said in his downtown Dallas office. "I believe there's a big problem in the world, and big problems need big solutions." The big problem is that billions of people in developing countries can't afford higher education. Whitney plans to offer it on the cheap – at one-quarter the price of competitors – by relying heavily on standardized lessons and the Internet. "We've got to get the cost of a college education under $1,000 a year," said Whitney creator Randy Best. "The whole mission is to reach the bottom of the pyramid." That "bottom of the pyramid" phrase comes up often when Mr. Best talks about Whitney. He said his efforts were inspired in part by reading "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits." That book, by C.K. Prahalad, argues that by targeting the global poor as a market, corporations can raise living standards – and make money.
5/29/2006 10:38:45 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Entrepreneur pursues dream of educational empire Dallas entrepreneur Randy Best has owned more than 100 companies in his career. Bakeries and defense contractors. Greeting-card makers and health-care companies. Companies that sell telecom equipment and companies that sell cheerleading equipment. But now, at 63, his focus is fully on education. Mr. Best is launching a network of for-profit education companies that he says could revolutionize the way students are taught, both in the U.S. and around the world. "We want to help train the next generation of educators," said Mr. Best, who has raised $50 million for the project, with much more to come. If he is successful, his private companies will move into roles traditionally held by public educators or nonprofit colleges. He wants American high schools to buy his curriculum. He wants them to pay his companies to train their teachers. And he wants to sell college education from Bogotá to Beijing. He says his companies can make the world a better place – and do it at costs low enough to turn a profit, even with bargain-basement tuition. He's gone after some big names. Rod Paige, a former secretary of education, sits on his companies' boards and serves as a senior adviser. Mike Moses, a former Dallas Independent School District superintendent and state education commissioner, is a key executive.
5/28/2006 10:34:55 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND LAW WON'T DO MUCH FOR YOUR CHILD Past experience with federal education programs predicts that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act will also fail parents whose children are doing poorly in school. The federal government has spent over $120 billion on Title 1 programs for low-income students since 1965. Yet the illiteracy rates for these children today are appalling, and the big achievement gap between low-income children and their peers has not closed. If the U.S. Department of Education wants to give real choice to parents, they should not be tinkering with a failed government-controlled school system that, by its very nature, strangles free choice and competition. If the federal government truly wants to give parents more school choice, they should be working to remove local and state controls over education, not adding to those controls with the No Child Left Behind law and other regulations. That is like trying to cure a person dying of arsenic poisoning by giving him more arsenic. Naturally, government education officials can't understand the fact that government control of education is not the solution, it is the problem. Over the past fifty years, federal, state, and city governments have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to "fix" the public schools. They have failed, time and again. For example, in July, 2005, the Congress-mandated National Assessment of Education Progress showed that high-school students' dismal reading skills have not improved since 1999.
5/27/2006 4:23:21 PM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
A Last Goliath: America's Public Education System As society changes, what people want from institutions changes. America's public school system is a case in point. It was created during the Industrial Revolution, which was a period of "big organizations doing big things." As parents left the farm and headed to the factories, children were shuffled into "education factories... organized, quite explicitly, to mimic factories and assembly lines, with students envisioned as products." In the 21st century, the sun is setting on the era of factories and assembly lines, and it makes sense to question the prevailing public education model, too. Just as products across the spectrum are being tailored to people's individual tastes, one-size-fits-all schooling seems antiquated. More and more, parents are seeking out new educational options that appeal to their particular circumstances. Trends are converging that make dramatic reform of the current system more likely. Technology gives people the flexibility to work from home and to find new ways to balance professional and family life. No longer, then, is it a given that schools have to perform the function of daycare for students with working parents. As more parents have the ability to spend more time at home, they can seek new ways for their children to receive instruction outside of traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Virtual schools, online education, and other new technologies could play a big role in the future of American education. But innovative learning tools and delivery mechanisms are just one area where technology is shaping the climate for reform. Today, parents have access to a wealth of information about America's public schools that was completely unavailable just a decade ago. All one has to do is visit the Standard and Poors website www.SchoolMatters.com, which aims to give "policymakers, educators, and parents the tools they need to make better-informed decisions that improve student performance." From test scores to budgets to teacher qualifications, SchoolMatters.com provides extensive information about almost every public school and school district in the country. This website-and others such as GreatSchools.net and RateMyTeacher.com-are giving parents unprecedented access to information about their children's schools.
5/26/2006 8:31:14 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Compulsory Schooling? In any debate, those who set the terms have a definite advantage. So, too, with education. It's almost universal for people, whether the establishment, reformers, or the average citizen, to use the terms "school" or "schooling," and "education" as if they are interchangeable, which they are not.  It's a truism that one can be educated without being schooled, as was Theodore Roosevelt.  Sickly as a child, "Teedie" as he was known to the family, was taught by an aunt, and educated through reading and travel, and didn't attend a formal school until he entered Harvard. One can also be "schooled" without being educated, as is too common. Those in charge of the public schools often complain that they must accept all children, whatever their background and condition. This is often used as an excuse for why many students cannot be taught, but that is a burden that is self-inflicted. Try to open up the system, as in higher education, so students can choose the school and the school can choose the student, and see who objects the most. Accept for the moment that schools are not responsible for some students not being able to learn because of their background. To be consistent the schools should disclaim any credit for students who do learn because of their backgrounds. But, of course, to argue that what students learn is determined by their out of school environment is to say that schools don't make any difference.              All states do have laws requiring a set school year, typically 180 days. But none require that many days of attendance. If they did then students who miss a day would be violating the law. Some urban schools find 25% or more of the student body absent each day, thus missing at least 45 days, or attending 135 days, per year.
5/25/2006 9:19:25 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
ADHD drugs take toll on minors Accidental overdoses and side effects from attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder drugs send about 3,100 Americans -- 80 percent of them children -- to hospital emergency rooms annually, a federal survey has found. Fourteen percent of patients had side effects including chest pain, high blood pressure and irregular heartbeats -- indicators of potentially serious cardiac problems. An estimated 3.3 million Americans who are 19 or younger and nearly 1.5 million ages 20 and older are taking ADHD medicines, making the incidence of emergency-room visits at less than 1 percent. The mostly male victims range in age from a one-month old infant to an octogenarian. Twenty-five deaths linked to ADHD drugs, 19 involving children, were reported to the FDA from 1999 through 2003. Fifty-four other cases of serious heart problems, including heart attacks and strokes, were also reported. Some of the patients had prior heart problems.
5/24/2006 6:41:32 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Reading not a science for many teachers - National council says colleges often don't focus on the systematic method   Most education schools do a poor job of training aspiring teachers in reading instruction, according to a new study. The National Council on Teacher Quality, which issued the report this week, examined course syllabi and required texts from 72 randomly selected education programs and found only 11 colleges, including Texas A&M University, teaching all elements of the science of reading. The report comes more than five years after the National Reading Council endorsed scientifically based approaches to reading, which federal officials define as grounded in the systematic teaching of phonics and related skills. The decision about how best to teach reading is repeatedly cast as a personal one, to be decided by the aspiring teacher. All methods are presented as being equally valid, and how one teaches reading is merely a decision that works best for the individual teacher. As a result, roughly one-third of public school fourth-graders read below basic levels, according to the report. The bottom line is, there is a lack of rigor in teacher preparatory courses, and we need to do something about it.
5/23/2006 9:10:57 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The cost of education - State must rethink how it funds its schools Michigan has an obvious structural funding problem in our schools, community colleges, universities and local units of government. It is being ignored by politicians in Lansing. Just pouring more money into schools without addressing the fundamental structural problems is the equivalent of Ford, GM and Delphi simply increasing the price of their products without addressing the issues causing their problems. We provide nearly $13 billion annually to educate our 1.7 million kids in grades K-12. Let's clean the slate and approach this challenge as if a new territory has been discovered. Would we create the current system to prepare them to thrive and survive in the 21st-Century global economy? I think not.
5/22/2006 12:36:23 PM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
More Children Left Behind Imagine being the parent of a child enrolled in a school that isn't working. You can't send him to a private school because you can't afford it, nor to another public school because there's no room. Every day he comes home from school depressed and disengaged. You do what you can. You visit with his teachers. You help with his homework. But you aren't a teacher. And his teachers, good people, are too busy to focus on your child. Slowly, he is drifting away. Too many children in this country are failing to get the education they need and deserve. What a tragedy it would be if, years from now, we learned that those responsible for providing that education to our children were the very ones responsible for their not getting it.
5/21/2006 4:42:39 PM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Universal Preschool Is No Panacea Proposition 82 would provide state funding for all four-year-olds in California to attend preschool. The Golden State already spends more than $3 billion per year to send low-income children to preschool. The new program, scheduled to cost more than $2 billion annually. But the case for universal preschool does not hold up to serious scrutiny. Researchers Darcy Olsen and Lisa Snell surveyed the research on early education polices in a new report for the Reason Foundation titled "Assessing Proposals for Preschool and Kindergarten: Essential Information for Parents, Taxpayers, and Policymakers" (http://www.reason.org/ps344_universalpreschool.pdf). What they found should make universal preschool advocates think twice. "We find strong evidence that widespread adoption of preschool and full-day kindergarten is unlikely to improve student achievement," Olsen and Snell write. "For nearly 50 years, local, state, and federal governments and diverse private sources have spent billions of dollars funding early education programs. Many early interventions have had meaningful short-term effects on grade-level retention and special education placement. However, the effects of early interventions routinely disappear after children leave the programs." Olsen and Snell draw a few important lessons from the research. This first concerns what's called "fade out." While early education programs may benefit some student groups (such as disadvantaged children) in the short run, these benefits disappear over time. For example, a February 2006 study by UC Santa Barbara researchers shows that the moderate gains made by children who attended preschool disappear by third grade. A study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics comparing the benefits of half-day and full-day kindergarten also found that the benefits faded out by third grade.
5/20/2006 8:30:09 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The Teacher Pay Myth and Other Budget Observations Gov. Mike Easley’s proposed budget for education starts from a number of faulty assumptions. Teacher pay, high school reform, and class-size reductions are among the spending items that grow in his budget plan despite a lack of evidence that they improve education in North Carolina. Here are some of the facts behind the myths and some recommendations about how to use the money better. Teacher Pay Increase Governor’s Proposal: $323 million. If the legislature approves Easley’s 8 percent teacher pay increase, the average adjusted teacher salary would climb to $56,960 – more than $5,000 above the adjusted national average. Funds designated for teacher salary increases should be used to implement a merit pay system that rewards individual teachers for the value they add to their students' academic performance. Expansion of Learn and Earn/Early College Schools State Board of Education Proposal: $7.6 million Governor’s Proposal: $9.8 million. Graduation rates for these schools remain about 18 percent lower than the state average. As a group, Learn and Earn/Early College schools had much lower average end-of-course test scores than state averages, despite maintaining a student-teacher ratio of 13:1. The state should not expand the program until there is empirical evidence that Learn and Earn/Early College schools improve student performance.   Expansion of Low Wealth Supplemental Funding State Board of Education Proposal: $0 - Governor’s Proposal: $41.9 million. There is no evidence that these additional funds are having a measurable effect on student performance. For example, the state’s four-year class size reduction program targeting low-performing and low-income elementary schools, found that smaller class sizes did not improve student achievement. The legislature should approve the governor’s request for funds to commission an independent evaluation of low wealth and disadvantaged student funding.
5/19/2006 10:23:44 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The people never really wanted government run pubic schools. The first general school law, Pennsylvania's Common School Act of 1834, so angered the public that virtually every legislator who voted for it was defeated for reelection. Horace Mann said in 1842 that he opposed compulsory attendance yet in 1852 he helped Massachusetts pass the nation's first such law, the only one before the Civil War.  As in Pennsylvania, there were strong objections.   Barnstable refused to comply with the law until the 1880s when the state militia forced children to attend school.           In 1860 Beverly, Massachusetts citizens voted to abolish their new high school.  In 1872, when a Michigan taxpayer sued to prevent his local district from levying taxes to support high schools, the state's  Supreme Court ruled unanimously against him.           As late as the 1890s a Pennsylvania governor vetoed a compulsory attendance law.  By 1898, only 16 states had compulsory laws, and enforcement was uneven.  Massachusetts continued to lead the way and, by 1906, had the nation's first universal compulsory public school system and the world's longest school year.  By 1918 all 48 states had some form of compulsory attendance law.           In Oregon the voters approved a 1922 initiative mandating that basic education students attend only public schools, which would abolish private schools.  In 1925, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parents had a right to determine how and where their children are educated. The struggle has never ended but, at last, there are signs of change.  Homeschooled students have increased from an estimated 10-15,000 in 1980 to perhaps 1,500,000 or more today.  Charter schools have grown from none in 1991 to 3,500 or more today, enrolling perhaps 1,000,000 students.  Public and private student scholarships are emerging, as has long been true in higher education.           Sadly, the main road to "freedom," has been for students to drop out.  An estimated 30% do not finish regular high school.  That is, 15 million of today's 50 million public school students may not graduate.   Millions more may graduate but with minimal skills.
5/18/2006 8:15:29 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Educational Progress Under NCLB Some states claimed that 80 percent to 90 percent of their students were proficient in reading and math, even though external measures such as the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) put the number at 30 percent or below. One state alleged that over 95 percent of their students graduated from high school even as independent studies put the figure closer to 65 percent. Another state determined that 99 percent of its school districts were making adequate progress, while others found that 99 percent of their teachers were highly qualified. Forty-four states reported that zero percent of their schools were persistently dangerous. With the approval of the U.S. Department of Education, many states are reporting educational results under NCLB that defy reality and common sense. In so doing, they are undermining the  effectiveness of the law. Principals and teachers in states that establish high standards under NCLB are under intense pressure to improve, while similar educators in states with low standards are told that everything is fine and they're doing a great job. Students in states that set the bar high for school performance have access to free tutoring and public school choice when their schools fall short; students in identical circumstances in other states must do without.  The result is a system of perverse incentives that rewards state education officials who misrepresent reality. Their performance looks better in the eyes of the public and they're able to avoid conflict with organized political interests. By contrast, officials who keep expectations high and report honest data have more hard choices to make and are penalized because their states look worse than others by comparison.
5/17/2006 10:37:02 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
A failure of textbooks in our schools. At its core, the economic surge in India and China comes down to brains. The industries driving the region’s challenge to American leadership — communications, information technology, biotech and the like — can’t thrive without a steady supply of highly educated, intellectually flexible workers. This is where the United States is falling behind. “Most U.S. high school students don’t take advanced science; they opt out, with only one-quarter enrolling in physics, one-half in chemistry,” the National Science Foundation found. The National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century concluded that U.S. students were “devastatingly far” from leading the world in science and math. American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated and light as a feather intellectually, flitting briefly over too many topics without examining any of them in detail. Worse, too many of them are pedagogically dishonest, so thoroughly massaged to mollify competing political and identity-group interests as to paint a startlingly misleading picture of America and its history. Textbooks have become so bland and watered-down that they are “a scandal and an outrage,” the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education think tank in Washington, charged in a scathing report issued a year and a half ago. “They are sanitized to avoid offending anyone who might complain at textbook adoption hearings in big states, they are poorly written, they are burdened with irrelevant and unedifying content, and they reach for the lowest common denominator,” Diane Ravitch, a senior official in the Education Department during the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, wrote in the report’s introduction. “As a result of all this, they undermine learning instead of building and encouraging it,” she added.
5/16/2006 9:05:14 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Only about half of the students who enroll in college persist and earn degrees within six years. What affects student retention and attainment and what steps to take to help this for the future. Higher education experts had been working for many years to understand the complex web of interrelated factors that affect student success. And so we identified a few of these leading thinkers on persistence and invested in a handful of their most promising ideas. The hallmark grants have yielded important, if not groundbreaking, information about what does and does not work in the difficult area of student retention in higher education. "The answers" have not yet been found, but these projects were a good bet because they accelerated the pace for testing these promising ideas in an expansive way. These projects also seemed to help solidify the Foundation’s commitment to the "culture of evidence" in which institutions use research to define current realities and then set about to improve those realities and forge a better future.
5/15/2006 10:50:09 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The NAACP's fight against private school vouchers Why would an organization that calls itself the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose motto is "Making Democracy Work Since 1909," oppose individual choice and freedom and dedicate itself to promoting public policy that guarantees the perpetuation of black poverty? Here, as elsewhere, NAACP leadership automatically equates big government with black interests. The public school monopoly serves the black community so notoriously poorly that many blacks themselves poll in favor of vouchers. The GAO reported in 2004 that there are almost three million kids nationwide in schools failing by No Child Left Behind criteria. These are disproportionately poor black kids. Half of these kids do not graduate and the ones that do, graduate with eighth grade reading skills. So what's going on here? You would think that NAACP leaders would be rabid in pushing for change and opening new educational opportunities available for black children. Yet, they doggedly defend a proven and hopeless failed status quo. The need for school choice for black kids goes beyond the argument for efficiency and competition. The education problem in the black community is really a social, moral and family problem.
5/14/2006 7:09:26 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The Early Reading and Mathematics Achievement of Children Who Repeated Kindergarten or Who Began School a Year Late The effectiveness of these practices, retention in particular, however, has been called into question (Dennebaum and Kulberg 1994; Kundert, May, and Brent 1995; Reynolds 1992). Some research has shown kindergarten repeaters perform worse in their second year of kindergarten than promoted peers who were recommended for retention in kindergarten (Dennebaum and Kulberg 1994), perform no differently than delayed-entry children later in school (e.g., second and fifth grade) (Kundert, May, and Brent 1995), and perform worse in reading and mathematics in fourth grade (Reynolds 1992). Other researchers suggest retention may have short-term benefits. Children appear to make larger cognitive gains in the year they repeat as compared to their first year through a grade (e.g., first-grade retention as studied by Alexander, Entwisle, and Dauber 1994). Recently, a review of the existing research note the need for future research that considers child and program characteristics when evaluating outcomes of retention and delayed entry practices (Jimerson 2001). These research findings have led many investigators to draw competing and even conflicting conclusions regarding grade retention and delayed entry.
5/13/2006 8:31:39 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
WHY PUBLIC SCHOOLS PRESSURE PARENTS TO GIVE THEIR KIDS MIND-ALTERING DRUGS Nothing condemns our public-school system more than the fact that many school authorities across America pressure parents to give mind-altering drugs to millions of normal, innocent children to stop bored kids from fidgeting in their seats or "not paying attention." Too often, school authorities refuse to accept the blame for our public schools' failure to teach our children or hold their interest in class. Public-school teaching is structured in such a way that it inevitably bores millions of normal, active children who are forced to sit in classrooms six to eight hours a day with about twenty other immature children. The teacher has to cover the curriculum, so she is pressured to teach all the kids the same material in the same way. Few teachers have the time or patience to know each child's unique personality, interests, strengths, or weaknesses, or give different instruction to each student. Young children in elementary school have natural high energy, and each child has his or her own unique personality. Most teachers simply don't have the time or patience to teach different material or use different teaching methods with each child. Just being cramped into a classroom with twenty other children and told to learn certain tasks by an adult they may not like, can annoy or frustrate many normal, high-energy, but emotionally immature children with a will of their own. Over-worked teachers are under enormous pressure to maintain discipline in class so they can do their job. If some students are disruptive, don't pay attention, or cause trouble in class, the teacher must do something about these children to keep order. In the old days, teachers could discipline kids by smacking or restraining them. If a teacher tried this today, parents would quickly slap her and the school with a lawsuit, so that kind of discipline is now impossible. Also compulsory-attendance laws and other Federal regulations now make it extremely difficult to expel a violent or disruptive student. So how do school authorities solve this discipline problem? Too often, they pressure parents to give Ritalin (or similar drugs) to "calm" children down or make them "focus" on their work. However, school authorities needed a way to justify "recommending" these mind-altering drugs to parents. They found this "justification" by going along with the psychiatric establishment's claim that millions of bored, high-energy, or "hyperactive" kids sitting in boring public-school classes, have an alleged mental illness called ADHD.
5/12/2006 10:28:36 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Tom Peters Judges Public Schools Arguing that "Children know how to learn. It's in the genes," Peters stressed that "The only thing that screws up learning is the classroom ...Designed perfectly to kill all interest in the subject matter at hand."           Nor is he an admirer of much that passes for "school reform."  In his view, "What the reform movement gives us is more of what we have, regimentation, standardization, and brutalizing boredom in places designed by the devil, called classrooms."
5/11/2006 9:06:11 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
The teachers unions are mad at me - by Mr. John Stossel I’m sorry that union teachers are mad at me. But when it comes to the union-dominated monopoly, the facts are inescapable. Many kids are miserable in bad schools. If they are not rich enough to move, or to pay for private school, they are trapped. It doesn’t have to be that way. We know what works: choice. That’s what’s brought Americans better computers, phones, movies, music, supermarkets – most everything we have. Schoolchildren deserve the joyous benefits of market competition, too. Unions say “education of the children is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market.” The opposite is true. Education is too important to be left to the calcified union/government monopoly. • The constant refrain that “public schools need more money” is nonsense. Many countries that spend significantly less on education do better than we do. School spending in America (adjusted for inflation) has more than tripled during the past 30 years, but national test scores are flat. The average per-pupil cost today is an astonishing $10,000 per student – $200,000 per classroom! Think about how many teachers you could hire, and how much better you could do with that amount of money. • Most American parents give their kids’ schools an A or B grade, but that’s only because, without market competition, they don’t know what they might have had. The educators who conduct the international tests say that most of the countries that do best are those that give school managers autonomy, and give parents and students the right to choose their schools. Competition forces private and public schools to improve. • There is little K-12 education competition in America because public schools are a government monopoly. Monopolies rarely innovate, and union-dominated monopolies, burdened with contracts filled with a hundred pages of suffocating rules, are worse. The head of New York City’s schools told me that the union’s rules “reward mediocrity.”
5/10/2006 5:54:02 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
SAT scores drop; some see red flag - Is it new test? Fewer repeat test-takers? Some colleges are reporting double-digit drops in the average SAT scores of applicants this year, even as other credentials, such as class rank and college-prep coursework, remained similar to or grew stronger than last year's. Among schools reporting large drops: The nine-campus University of California system, which saw a 15-point drop on average among applicants, Average composite scores for the ACT, a rival college entrance exam, were unchanged from last year. It's not yet clear what the drops mean, but colleges are particularly curious because the scores are almost completely based on the new SAT, introduced last year by the non-profit College Board, which owns the test. “We need to have confidence in the test that we're using,” says Stephen Farmer, director of admissions at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, which saw a 12-point drop.
5/09/2006 9:34:22 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Judge likely to halt California high shool exit exam A group of high school students and their parents sued the California Department of Education in February, seeking a preliminary injunction to halt giving the state exit exam to this year's senior class. It's the first class required to pass the exam to earn a diploma. Judge Freedman said in his tentative ruling that he is likely to issue the injunction, based on the plaintiffs' argument that all California students do not have access to the same quality of education. There is overwhelming evidence that kids who attend schools in large cities are far more likely to be taught by teachers who are not qualified or credentialed The department said last week that about 11  percent of this year's senior class (about 46,000 students) has yet to pass the English and math test, although students have multiple opportunities to take the exam. Department officials noted that in previous years, about 13 percent of seniors failed to graduate for various reasons. The same Alameda County judge is scheduled to hear arguments next week in another lawsuit against the exam. Public Advocates, which won a $1 billion settlement over equal access to education in California schools, claims the department failed to properly investigate alternatives to the exam.
5/08/2006 10:45:49 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
A new army in New York fights for more charter schools. In New York, two dozen Assembly Democrats will fight the good fight for education reform this week, pushing their colleagues to authorize dozens more charter schools across the city and the state. For the sake of thousands of children trapped in lousy public schools, we wish them every success. The soldiers in this battle are mostly black or Latino, mostly from New York City, and all represent the inner-city neighborhoods where public education has failed most tragically. Lawmakers such as Vito Lopez of Brooklyn, Michael Benjamin of the Bronx and Sam Hoyt of Buffalo have seen their constituents line up by the thousands to enroll their children in charter schools - and put their names on waiting lists when the coveted seats fill up. They've also seen the test scores proving that charter schools consistently do a better job than traditional public schools in the very same neighborhoods. And now, in the face of opposition by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the teachers union, they're demanding that lots more families receive the same golden opportunity.
5/07/2006 11:02:28 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
According to NEA's research and other sources, today's teachers are primarily white, female, married, religious, and on average are 43 years old. More than half hold at least a master's degree.  America's public schoolteachers are the most educated, most experienced ever. They have many years of experience. Nearly half of all public schoolteachers (49%) have been in the classroom 15 years or longer; more than one-third (38%) have 20 or more years of classroom experience. The majority of teachers hold one or more advanced degrees.  More than half (57%) hold at least a master's degree. The percentage of teachers with a master's degree has more than doubled since 1961.  Less than half (43%) of public schoolteachers hold only a bachelor's degree-the smallest percentage in 40 years. Public school teachers are highly skilled in the subjects they teach.  Nine out of 10 teachers (90%) say they spend no time teaching grades or subjects outside their licensed subject area. The number of teachers leaving the profession is increasing. Working conditions and low salaries are by far the primary reasons cited by individuals who do not plan to continue teaching until retirement. Twenty percent of teachers say unsatisfactory working conditions keep them from wanting to stay in the profession.  And 37 percent who do not plan to teach until retirement blame low pay for their decision to quit teaching. The percentages are even greater for minority teachers (50%), for male teachers (43%), and for teachers under 30 (47%).  Nationwide, more than 3.9 million teachers will be needed by 2014 because of teacher attrition, retirement and increased student enrollment. Many new teachers leave after five years. Close to 50 percent of newcomers leave the profession during the first five years of teaching. Teacher shortages create shortages in some subjects more than most. The greatest shortages of teachers are in bilingual and special education, mathematics, science, computer science, English as a second language and foreign languages. The teaching profession also is experiencing a shortage of male teachers. Male teachers are a dwindling breed.  A few good men.  Just 24.9 percent of the nation's 3 million teachers are men. Slow extinction of the male teacher. The percentage of male elementary teachers (9%) and male secondary teachers (35%) has fallen gradually since 1961 and now is at the lowest level in four decades. More money, more male teachers.  States with higher teacher salaries tend to have the most male teachers.  Michigan ranks first in the percentage of male teachers (37%), and ranks in the top five nationally in teacher pay. Mississippi ranks 50th in the percentage of male teachers (18%), and ranks 49th in teacher pay.
5/06/2006 6:37:41 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
THE RIGHT TO BEHAVE RUDELY? I recently substituted for two consecutive days for a "lab" (i.e., remedial) high school literature class. I was met with ongoing resistance from half the class relative to the lesson, which was comprised of my reading aloud from a novel (since no one else would volunteer to read and I didn't think I'd be successful 'forcing' students to do it). It took nearly a full hour to read one short chapter, because I had to keep stopping and coaxing students to stop being disruptive. (Disruptions included pacing around the room -- including hovering behind me in my 'blind spot' as I stood at the podium; surfing the Web without permission; listening to headphones, then scowling when I'd ask them to turn the volume down; 'scooting' around the room on a desk chair with wheels; blowing bubbles through a long straw -- toddler-style; eating and sleeping; and holding conversations -- all while I was trying to read.) Note the average age of these kids is 16 and this was NOT a special ed class. Whenever I'd prompt/warn perpetrators to behave, I was met with proclamations about the 'rights' students have vs. the 'rights' I supposedly do not have as a substitute. (Meanwhile, 50% of the class waited patiently for me to finish reading and help them with related comprehension questions.) I angrily read them the riot act, as follows: "You do not have the right to prevent other students from learning! In fact, my understanding is that disrupting the educational process is illegal. Did you know that? Students who actually want to learn do not have to put up with this. You are not hurting me -- you are preventing other students from learning. You do not have the right to do that, etc. etc."
5/05/2006 10:31:55 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
TEEN-SCREEN - STEALING OUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE The latest foray into our society is the insidious TeenScreen, a suicide screening program, put forth as a solution to save our younger generation from what psychiatry is promoting as an epidemic of teen suicides. However, TeenScreen lies. There is no epidemic. In actuality, in my state, Florida, there have been a total of 250 child and teen suicides in the last 5 years. That's an average of 50 a year out of millions of young people. Each one is a tragedy but this is hardly an epidemic. What the psychiatric community has also failed to mention was that a majority of those 250 who committed suicide had received psychiatric treatment, with most of them on one or more psychiatric drugs. Some of these drugs carry black warning labels from the FDA stating that they can cause violence and suicide in young people. If psychiatry failed those young people and maybe even contributed to their death, why would we deliver more children into their clutches?
5/04/2006 9:05:09 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
In lawsuit, parents say schools ignore their beliefs LEXINGTON -- At the center of a federal lawsuit filed last week by two sets of Lexington parents over the discussion of homosexuality in public elementary schools is the question: Do parents or public schools have the final say in deciding what morals, values, and principles should be taught to children, and at what age should those lessons take place? As in many similar debates before it, the parents -- David and Tonia Parker and Joseph Robert and Robin Wirthlin -- have raised the issue of religious freedom. The Parkers and the Wirthlins are described in the lawsuit as devout Judeo-Christians who believe that homosexuality is immoral behavior that goes against the ''laws of the God of Abraham." They say that teachers and administrators are indoctrinating children to believe that homosexuality is acceptable by exposing children to gay-themed storybooks and other lessons in a compulsory school setting.
5/03/2006 6:23:00 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
What Makes a High School Great? "We are changing the goal of high school and what it's possible to achieve there," says Tom Vander Ark, executive director of the Gates Foundation's education initiative, which has spent $1 billion in 1,600 high schools in 40 states plus the District of Columbia over the last six years. For parents and students, these schools mean an often bewildering array of choices -- small schools within larger schools, specialized charter and magnet schools for things ranging from fashion design to computer programming, even public boarding schools for budding physicists or artists. On the plus side, students get more adult attention and are less likely to be lost in the crowd. They can focus on subjects they really care about while still getting a grounding in the basics. But some educators think this boutique approach comes with a cost: the loss of a common experience that brings everyone together under one big roof. Maintaining quality is another major obstacle. "I think we're still flailing around," says James Anderson, a professor of educational-policy studies at the University of Illinois. "A lot of this is more theater than substance." Vander Ark agrees that the new schools need to prove they're providing a markedly better alternative to regular public schools. "We want to make sure people raise the bar," he says. Educators have been demanding reform for decades, and it has often seemed as if ferocious policy debates were the biggest obstacles to improvement. Reformers in the 1980s wanted to make all students college-ready with a rigorous core curriculum. A decade later, school choice and testing were the big buzzwords, with some activists arguing that the entire public-school system should be dismantled. More recently, small schools -- first proposed decades ago -- have gained traction with funding from organizations like the Gates Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund.
5/02/2006 9:01:10 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Models of middle school success - 2 charters flourish, but city rarely seeks their input Educators came to Baltimore last week from Massachusetts, New York, Washington and Virginia to study the success of the Crossroads School. They talked to pupils who, despite impoverished backgrounds, have published a book, made a model of the solar system and outscored their peers, not only around the city but in some cases statewide as well. Crossroads is one of two charter middle schools in the city receiving national recognition for their work educating vulnerable children at a particularly vulnerable age. The other, KIPP Ujima Village Academy, is part of a network of schools held up by Oprah Winfrey last month as an urban education model the same week she lashed out at the Baltimore school system for its poor track record. Meanwhile, city school system officials are grappling with how to reform their 23 traditional middle schools, all of which are failing. They have said that middle schools nationwide have the same problems, and that few models to emulate exist. But staff at Crossroads and KIPP say the system has generally not turned for guidance to the schools, which are producing high student achievement with the same population as ordinary city schools.
5/01/2006 9:04:39 AM	posted by: Jeffrey D. Proud
Should class size be a top priority?: No...Focusing on sheer numbers won't improve teacher quality Research is clear that good teachers matter more than small classes, and all of these problems are substantial obstacles to attracting and retaining top teachers. To get the most bang for the buck, teacher quality rather than quantity should be New York City's top priority right now. Hiring, placement and retention of teachers also need to change. The New Teacher Project has found that in school districts collective bargaining contracts complicate teacher hiring, placement and retention. And rather than receiving substantial mentoring and support, rookies are largely left to sink or swim on their own.