One More Nail in the NCLB Coffin

Did you catch this article today, www.nytimes.com/2008/10/15/education/15prize.html A school district in Brownsville, Texas won the most important national prize for "excellence" urban education, while having failed to meet NCLB standards for two years. And there you have it -- educational outcomes that, by one measure, define "excellence" by another measure are substandard. Now theoretically urban education could be so terrible that compared to the field a failing school would be not so bad. But that is not what the the judges said. Rather they praised the district for doing a better job than others which had simila...Read More

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As the Headlines Trace the Collapse of the Housing Bubble, Schools Face a Different Disaster

Did you all catch the piece in the Times this morning about the squeeze schools face with NCLB? www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/education/13child.html Basically, schools made a deal with NCLB, promising slow progress for a few years, then rapid improvement in testing scores later one. But there are three problems with that devil's bargin: 1) we have reached "later on" and the schools have no chance of making the, say, 11% improvement they have promised. According to one expert, every elementary school in California will fail to meet its goals in a few years. 2) The whole goal system is flawed because progress is det...Read More

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On Teenagers and Books; Americans and Math; Video-visits to Schools.

Teenagers and Books

Kevin Jarrett sent me this, www.ypulse.com/reaching-young-adult-readers/ It is the result of a survey of readers aged 15-24. In general the responses were both reassuring to book people, and showed some of the challenges books face. For example,  "Younger Adult book readers live in Two Media Worlds They share many core book reading values with older readers – but are digitally-trained to expect "what I want!" now." For these teenagers and college students, books remain a good choice, but must find their place in a changing media environment. That sounds exactly right to me. The one alarm bell was that this was a survey of young people wh...Read More

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Everyday the Dow Falls Further, and the Bad News Spreads

to Europe, Asia, and back around the world to our own retirement plans here. How can we explain this to students? How can we locate what is going on right now, in the crawlers we see on our screens (much less the news on TV or the printed headlines the next day) within the curriculum students get in, say, middle or high school?

Surely every US history teacher has mentioned 1929, and in those high school that have Economics classes, teachers are trained in talking about things like sub-prime mortgages and collateralized debt swaps. But between making the very obvious analogy to the past, and going into technical detail, what can schools offer to their students? What tools do teachers, librarians, authors have to help young people who may not be following the economic news carefully, but may inste...Read More

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The New York Times is doing an ongoing series on reading and how it may be changing. This second piece www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/books/06games.html links directly to the issues we have been talking about here -- is gaming a path to reading, a challenge to reading, a form of reading? And whatever gaming (and the entire online world) mean for books, how does that change (or should it change) what authors, illustrators, designers and editors -- as well as parents, teachers, librarians, booksellers, and kids -- do in books? 

As I indicated in the last blog -- I think there is a great deal the digital world can offer to those of us who work in print. But I also feel we are just, tenstatively, learning how this can work. Do those of us who write middle grade or YA no...Read More

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What Can We Learn From the Music Industry?

If you have the patience to wait through a bit of potted history, I have a point for us all to consider: Any adult has been through at least two revolutions in how s/he purchased and listened to music. We grew up with records, we made the transition to CDs, and then to downloads and ipods. And no matter what kind of music you like, you surely are aware that these two revolutions had diametically opposite effects on the music industry. The shift from records to CDs was a bonanza -- artists and labels made new money on old records, as we all realized we needed to have our music in the new format. Then with downloads, music companies feared going out of business and took Napster and other file-sharing sites to court. But even as fights over copyright raged, the entire model of the industry changed. As Vicki Cobb reminded me -- a mus...Read More

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I Like What I Am Seeing

We all know that the digital world has great potential for teaching, for schools, and as a domain that can work with and enhance print. But potential is as potential does -- for so many of us, new devices and programs are developed somewhere far away, and we catch up when, if, and however we can. But I've seen four things that make the potential of the net seem much closer -- much more something we can use as parents, teachers, librarians, and authors.

Loree Griffin Burns sent me this link to her blog, and a site she has discovered: lgburns.livejournal.com/110968.html Loree brings us to the slideshow of the Visualization Challenge of the National Science Foundation, and Science magazine. I sat there with my 8 year old and he could not get enough of looking at ...Read More

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Colleges Weigh How to Judge Students

Today's Times has the next step in the college admissions re-evaluatoin: www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/education/29admissions.html The head of the commission I discussed the other day spoke at a convention to many other college admissions officers. If you read the article to the end you see two opposite strands -- all of the college folks know that that SAT system is unfair. A student whose parents can afford $400 a hour test prep tutors starting in 7th grade cannot be meaningfully compared to a student who has to take two busses to reach a test site, or did not know there were ways to wave the fee for the tests, or that, now, scores from various tries at the test can be mixed and matched. While the tests produce ...Read More

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I Am Just Back from the FAME Conference in Orlando

For those of you not up on your acronyms, this was the Flordia Association for Media in Education conference, not a workshop on how to get on American Idol. Since ALA was in Anaheim, and I recently went to an NCTE at Opryland in Nashville, I've now had a real eyeful of the resort-convention-center-theme-park-hotel-atrium. They are all similar, and similarly weird. You are living in a computer design -- you can just picture how the layout looked on someone's screen, and all of the faux rock, and faux pirate ships, and faux jungle, and the bored, dozing, real turtles and alligators also seem plucked directly from a screen. They have that almost real yet clearly fake quality of computer-generated cartoons. Being in this theme park just as Congress debates a $700 billion bailout, you have a sense of disjunction, of distance....Read More

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Did You Catch the New Report about the Shift Away from College Tests?

Here is the Times article, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/education/22admissions.html As the piece explained, a panel headed by the Harvard admissions director has suggested that in determining who is a good candidate, schools shift away from tests such as the SAT or ACT and instead look at specific courses whose content links to college work, and life skills. The problem, of course, is that the importance given to the tests has spawned the entire test-prep industry, as well as the high school test focus frenzy. So students, teachers, parents are all intent on getting those numbers up, but the numbers may not predict anything at all about how the student will do after high school. ...Read More

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More On Boys and School

Nadine's report that her first grade son was forbidden to read nonfiction is horrifying -- anyone else have similar experiences? Or opposite experiences? I wonder how common that kind of blindness disguised as concern is. Her story reminded me of another recent classroom experience and helped crystalize one of my concerns.

A teacher I was listening to mentioned the Invention Convention that will come at the end of the year. She was at great pains to insist that the parents spend no more then $10 on supplies and that the kids should not build robots or machines designed to clean kitchens. Instead, she singled out as the appropriate kind of creation a recent project by a young girl. The girl was having trouble keeping all of her pencils on her desk. So she made a desk guard, a bumper to hold them all safely in place.

...Read More

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Two Interesting, and In Ways Opposite, Pieces of Information on Boys and School

This blog features a personal anecdote, and sophisticated academic research but each, I suspect, is a piece of the boy-school puzzle.

Last night I went to the "Back to School" night at the elementary school where my older son is starting third grade. We visited the neat and trim classroom whose walls were papered with clear informative posters, as well as charts tracking homework assignments completed. But when the teacher told us about the focus of study for the year ahead, the books she mentioned were Charlotte's Web, Cinderella, and an author unit on Beverly Cleary. She mentioned nonfiction, but only in terms of content that they planned to study, not books/authors that they planned to read. Nonfiction, at least according to this presentation, was a tool ...Read More

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