It bodes well for the future that there are kids with enough intelligence and moxie to gracefully pull off telling the adults in charge (parents, teachers, principals, chancellors of education) that the current state of D.C. high schools could use a little work, and that they’d like to do a ninth-grade year at their only-to-eighth-grade middle school to, you know, prepare.
Shaw Middle School had, until recently, been a sketchy educational institution. Now it’s amazing, the kids love it, and they see no reason to leave their wonderfully overhauled school if the high school options have yet to be improved.
The kids ended up in Michelle Rhee’s office, the chancellor who—if her reputation is to be believed—doesn’t take anyone’s crap and rarely goes in any direction but her own.
In the end, it was impossible to say no to children who were telling her that D.C. educators had done such a good job bringing high standards and creative teaching back to Shaw that they wanted to get more of it before moving on. “It’s maybe not the right decision for the system,” said Rhee, who had to make many last-minute adjustments, “but it is the right decision for those kids.”
By letting 90 students remain [at Shaw] for one more year, Rhee is acknowledging that some of the high schools they might attend still need work. “I wasn’t in a situation where I could look these kids in the eyes and say, ‘I have a really good option for all of you to go to high school’ ” next year, Rhee said. But she said the schools that would most likely take them, such as Cardozo, Dunbar and Roosevelt, were improving and would be ready for them as 10th-graders.
So. Damn. Cool. I’m proud of the whippersnappers and the grown-ups.
I remain wary of Obama’s teacher compensation plan, but here are two articles on the subject. As I opined previously, the idea of paying the good teachers well is wonderful and I would wholeheartedly say “yes” if the world were more with the logic and the black-and-whiteness and less with the grey areas and red tape.
Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic, but I worry that somehow, even the great teachers who are doing the best they can with what they have will get screwed because they don’t have the resources available to them to do the proper job of educating that they’d like to do. Also, it strikes me that the only way for the powers that be to know which educators are improving/ being wonderful teachers is to test the students. That brings us right back to standardized testing and kids being caught in the middle and that always just pisses me off. Sometimes I wish I were brilliant think-tank fodder so I could solve problems like this.
The National Review Online has an illuminating article up pointing out the illogicality (and foolishness) of putting too much faith in the warped college rankings system. I’ve said about all I can say (using professional language) about the rankings, so I’ll hold back and let Frederick M. Hess and Thomas Gift from NRO speak wisely (and way more professionally) instead:
Some of the schools with higher rankings may truly have improved, but the most significant factor is that two of the Barron’s criteria — high-school grades and percentage of applicants accepted — don’t mean what they did a decade ago. Grade inflation, and students’ applying to more schools than they used to, have juiced the numbers to make students look more qualified and schools more selective.
Grade inflation, dubbed “high schools’ skeleton in the closet” by Lehigh University education professor Perry Zirkel, has been a creeping phenomenon for two decades.
Also, whereas college-bound students used to limit applications to a few top choices, it is not unusual for students today to apply to many more. UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute has reported that the percentage of high-school seniors who applied to four or more colleges increased by more than a quarter from 1996 to 2006 and now stands at over 60 percent….. when students in general submit more applications, colleges in general get to reject more applicants — making schools across the board more “selective” by the Barron’s criteria.
And that is why trusting the evil genius rankings machine is a mistake. Be aware of who’s in charge and make decisions accordingly.
Wednesday March 25th 2009, 12:06 pm
Filed under: College, University
I want to take this class! If I went to Carnegie Mellon, I totally would. Then perhaps I could finally understand the deep-seated reasons behind my shoe-choice evolution. In middle school I was the first kid in my small town to wear these:
In high school I moved on to these:
And now, as a dress-and-sneaker-wearing mommy, I wear these:
Or, when it’s cold (nine months of the year in this damn city), I wear black t-shirts, jeans, and the Fluevogs I bought ten years ago:
What does it all mean? That I like to be comfortable? That I enjoyed the thrill of being labeled a freak in middle school (not hard to accomplish, everyone’s a freak in middle school)? Or that, deep down, I’m lazy when it comes to fashion? Are shoes just not my thing? Or ARE they my thing and I’ve just been fortunate enough to find the few pairs that make me happy?
These are questions Sneakerology 101 could answer about my own relationship with shoes, as well as answering questions about some of the more shoe-obsessed people in our society. There’s a whole sneaker culture out there that I find fascinating. My petite collection of Converse low-tops in several colors does not hold a candle to the piles of sneakers some people have obsessively amassed.
Here’s an interesting study on perspective, perceptions, and how socioeconomic placement and ethnicity do or don’t affect parents’ beliefs about what constitutes “kindergarten readiness” for their progeny.
Apparently, the kids from families in which “authoritarian” rule is key are good with following the rules, but aren’t so quick with autonomy and inferring, both of which come in handy in life when you’re left to solve some problems on your own.
The other kids, who were raised by parents who feel that knowing all the stuff—letters, numbers, colors, etc.—is super important, were, not surprisingly, really ready in the “nominal skills” department.
However, as great as it is for the authoritarian kids to know how to behave and follow the rules, and for the nominal-skills kids to be able to recite lists of knowledge bits, it would be a far far better thing for both sets of kiddos to be able to kick some problem-solving ass, because life is partly about rule-following, and partly about knowing lots of stuff, but it’s mostly about grokking a problem and being able to solve it.
Research Findings: This study analyzed the school readiness beliefs of parents of 452 children from public pre-kindergarten and the relations of these beliefs to socio-economic status and children’s readiness skills. Parents conceived readiness largely in terms of the ability to name objects, letters, or numbers, but few included inferential skills. Readiness beliefs were related not to socioeconomic status but to ethnicity. Readiness beliefs about the importance of independence, social competence, nominal knowledge, and inferential skills were related in expected ways to children’s skills.
Practice or Policy: Infrequent inclusion of inferential skills among parents’ readiness beliefs may not bode well for children. Informational programs for parents about the critical role of higher order cognitive skills and ways to promote them are needed.
It’s amazing what starts to look enticing when the economy is sucking. Nationwide, colleges and universities have reported phenomenal increases in the number of applicants for RA positions. RAs (resident advisors) are the long-suffering, non-freshmen, adult(ish) folks who agree to live in vomit-splattered, high-volume dorms in exchange for free room and board at their institution of higher education.
It is a thankless job, and, as Tara J. Hart, director of housing and residence life at Seton Hall points out:
“When we’re recruiting students, we put out there that if you’re doing this for the money, you will have earned it by Halloween,” she said. “The nature of this job is that much will be asked of you.”
Beyond the short-term savings, the experience can also help in an increasingly slim job market.
“These kids learn problem-solving, conflict resolution, crisis management, communication skills and programming,” said Mr. Dunkel, director of housing at the University of Florida. “You can translate that skill set to any career. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a teacher in a classroom or an accountant.”
During my freshman-year stint in the dorms, it was widely considered among the resident hall population that only an upperclassman with an extreme lack of tuition money would ever consider putting themselves in harm’s way (that would be in the way of a pack of newly-liberated-from-parental-control freshmen) for what is basically a non-paying job that totally wrecks your sleeping and studying schedules.
However, it was also considered by the lot of us that only someone with a higher degree of motivation to become educated than any of us college-fund-having kiddos had would accept such a job. So, while on the one hand we thought of our RAs as an especially cranky variety of fun-hating babysitter, we also had to admit that out of all of us, they were the most willing to do whatever it was going to take to earn a college degree—even put up with our played-out antics (which we thought were phenomenally original, but which the RAs and the janitors always knew exactly how to clean up, thereby calling into question our actual level of inventiveness). Flame Ball was our only impossible-to-erase hijink because, as it turns out, you cannot erase fire from carpet.
The RAND Corportation just released a report on charter schools and whether they’re a help or a hindrance to the students that attend them. Charter schools are one of the reigning flavors of the month in the education debate kerfuffle. It’s a wee bit chaotic in the education world right now, but here’s the simple version of the yeas and nays with regard to charter schools:
While the number of charter schools continues to grow, debate continues about whether charter schools provide a better education experience than traditional public schools. Proponents contend that charter schools expand educational choices for students, increase innovation, improve student achievement and provide much-needed competition to public schools.
Opponents, meanwhile, argue that charter schools lead to increased racial or ethnic stratification of students, skim the best students from traditional public schools, reduce resources for public schools and provide no real improvement in student achievement.
The study was conducted in several states, which one would hope for in a decently scientific study. I think more research in more schools over longer periods of time is necessary to really know the impact charter schools have on student outcome. But for now, with the information the study gave us to go on, it’s interesting to note that there’s nothing hugely wonderful or negative at the elementary-school level, but that at the high school level things look a little better.
The most promising results for charter schools relate to the long-term outcomes of high-school graduation and college entry. In the two locations with available data on these critical attainment outcomes (Chicago and Florida), charter high schools appear to have substantial positive impacts, increasing the probability of graduating by 7 to 15 percentage points and increasing the probability of enrolling in college by 8 to 10 percentage points.
Perhaps those numbers are due to smaller schools with fewer kids getting lost in the shuffle, or maybe the kids at charter high schools are more interested in the curriculum. Whatever it is, the numbers aren’t astounding, but they’re still positive, which is good. We like it when kids graduate and head to college.
Do you ever watch something on the news and wonder what everyone will think about it a few decades hence? This news clip from 1981 relates to the journalism degree post. It’s fascinating. And also like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I wonder if all journalists and journalism majors yelled loud enough, they could yell back to 1981 and tell the San Francisco Chronicle employees to please—for the love of our future careers and yours—stop.
“MBA” is a wince-worthy term these days. The NY Times is saying MBA programs are in need of a major overhaul. Jon Stewart just cleaned Jim Cramer’s clock using only words and logic. And then there’s the whole tanking economy, which some folks are blaming the MBA-havin’ money guys for.
In light of all of the above, my advice to anyone wishing to earn their MBA degree is to please think a little bit outside the business-school box and maybe get yourselves a slightly more well-rounded education than the current population of MBAs seem to have done. I see nothing negative about earning an MBA; having an understanding of the inner-workings of money, finance, and business theory could only serve one well. But dig deeper and think bigger, people.
I found this perfect bit from xkcd on Tiara Shafiq’s blog, EducateDeviate. I know that we can’t have teenagers running amok and learning only what interests them, but wouldn’t it be cool if we could? They’d probably still find a reason to loathe adults, but maybe the angst would be diluted ever so slightly.
