Top story for Teacher Appreciation Week: Student donates kidney to teacher

I got some very nice cards, especially those that were hand made, from the heart.  I got a candy bar when I really needed it.

This woman got a kidney from a former student.  How could you top that?

In Elwood, Indiana, former student Angie Collins saved Darren Paquin’s life.  What did he teach her, besides English?

Two million minute challenge

Just over two weeks to graduation, son James is concerned about global competitiveness.  He’s off to study physics at Lawrence University in the fall; he is insistent I note the news in the paper this week.  I still have an active  stake in public schools, after all — good call, James.  Here’s his concern, below.

Each child has two million minutes of life over the four years of high school. Whether the U.S. can remain competitive in the global economy depends more than ever on how each child allocates those two million minutes.

A new film raises concerns that U.S. children are losing out against students from India and China.

Dallas Morning News business reporter Jim Landers wrote about the movie, “Two Million Minutes,” in an article May 6. It’s an indication of something that this is front page in the business section — an indication of genuine concern, one may hope.

Science and mathematics education gets the major attention in the film. One wishes this film could compete with the anti-science film “Expelled!” which still lingers malodrously in a few theatres across the nation.

Landers wrote:

2 Million Minutes argues that “the battle for America’s economic future isn’t being fought by our government. It’s being fought by our kids.”

And in a series of international comparisons, the U.S. kids are not doing so well. The one area where they score better than the rest is self-confidence.

Once they leave the eighth grade, students have a little more than 2 million minutes to get ready for work or college and the transition to being an adult. This documentary, made by high-tech entrepreneur Robert Compton, follows two high school seniors in Carmel, Ind., two in Bangalore, India, and two in Shanghai, China, to see how they use their time.

All six are bright, accomplished, college-bound individuals.

Our students spend a lot of time watching TV, working part-time jobs, playing sports and video games, but not so much on homework. The Chinese kids spend an extra month in school each year, more hours at school each day and more hours doing homework. By the time they graduate, Chinese students have spent more than twice as much time studying as their U.S. counterparts.

While one may hope kids will pay attention, one may be unhappy to recall the topic, and many of the same or similar numbers, were published nationally in the 1980s by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) at the U.S. Department of Education. I remember it well, since I was publisher for some of the work.

The website for the movie offers more details, including a calendar of screenings. DVDs are available, but at very high prices — $25 for home use, $100 for school or non-profit use. I’d love to show it to students; I can get a couple of much-needed PBS videos for that same price. I hope producers will work to arrange distribution competitive with opposition movies like Stein’s. I’ll wager “Expelled!” will hit the DVD market at about $10.00, with thousands of DVDs available for free to churches and anti-science organizations.

Landers chalks up some of the stakes, and we should all pay attention:

FALLING BEHIND IN EDUCATION

Nearly 60 percent of the patents filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the field of information technology now originate in Asia.

The United States ranks 17th among nations in high-school graduation rate and 14th in college graduation rate.

In China, virtually all high school students study calculus; in the United States, 13 percent study calculus.

For every American elementary and secondary school student studying Chinese, there are 10,000 students in China studying English.

The average American youth now spends 66 percent more time watching television than in school.

SOURCE: “Is America Falling off the Flat Earth?” by Norman R. Augustine, chairman, National Academy of Sciences “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” committee

$1 billion boondoggle: Bush’s reading program doesn’t work

From today’s New York Times:

By SAM DILLON

Published: May 2, 2008

President Bush’s $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released on Thursday.

Read the study here:

Created under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, the Reading First program provides assistance to states and districts in using research-based reading programs and instructional materials for students in kindergarten through third grade and in introducing related professional development and assessments. The program’s purpose is to ensure that increased proportions of students read at or above grade level, have mastery of the essential components of early reading, and that all students can read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. The law requires that an independent, rigorous evaluation of the program be conducted to determine if the program influences teaching practices, mastery of early reading components, and student reading comprehension. This interim report presents the impacts of Reading First on classroom reading instruction and student reading comprehension during the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years.

The evaluation found that Reading First did have positive, statistically significant impacts on the total class time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program. The study also found that, on average across the 18 study sites, Reading First did not have statistically significant impacts on student reading comprehension test scores in grades 1-3. A final report on the impacts from 2004-2007 (three school years with Reading First funding) and on the relationships between changes in instructional practice and student reading comprehension is expected in late 2008.

Chairman McLeroy to Texas Hispanics: “Drop dead!”

With evidence mounting that the politically-motivated rewrite of English standards in Texas schools would harm the education of Spanish-speaking students, the Chairman of the Texas Education Agency told state legislators, English language experts and educators that he will not allow time to analyze the proposed changes to see if they are appropriate, let alone time for changes to the standards.

In short, McLeroy told Texas Hispanics to “drop dead.”

Board chairman Don McLeroy insisted that major changes to the proposed updates are no longer possible. Advocates say the standards need opinions from experts who have researched Hispanic children and understand their learning styles.

“There is no way that ignoring such a sizable chunk of this population from consideration of education policy will do anything but harm the opportunity of a generation,” Herrero said.

McLeroy said there had been plenty of time for experts to weigh in earlier on new curriculum standards. He said he was shocked by accusations that he and others board members are trying to shortchange Hispanic students.

“There’s no malice at all, none, zip, nada. There’s just no time to get another expert in,” McLeroy said. “None of us would do anything to hurt any group of children or any (individual) child. What we want is for them to be successful in the English language because it’s so important.”

In the latest of a string of politically charged bulldozings, McLeroy is pushing standards substituted at the last minute for standards Texas educators had worked on for three years. McLeroy hired a political consulting group to rewrite the standards and substituted the rewrite in a meeting earlier this year (you’ll see my bias when you read the story in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram). Educators, parents, legislators and community leaders criticized the action for disregarding the educational needs of Texas students.

“It’s just ignorance on their part,” said Mary Helen Berlanga, a 26-year board member from Corpus Christi.

The board is set to take a preliminary vote March 27 on the new English language arts and readings standards, which will influence new textbooks for the 2009-10 school year.

A four-member board subcommittee signaled its intent Wednesday to stick with that schedule after state Rep. Abel Herrero, D-Robstown, pleaded to let Latino experts review the standards first.

McLeroy is flexing never-tried-before political muscles in a series of changes at TEA. Last year he led the SBOE to arbitrarily reject a math book by a major publisher, daring legal action, hoping he could finally win a case establishing that the board can reject books on political grounds. Biology books are due for a review in the near future, and science and biology standards will be rewritten before that process.

Moving against Hispanic students on the English standards, if successful, would tend to demonstrate that Texas educato needs to dance to the red book writings of Chairman McLeroy. While 47% of Texas public school students are Hispanic, Hispanic voters have generally packed less clout.

McLeroy appears to be counting on Obama and Clinton Democrats to demonstrate apathy again near the general election. If election numbers from the March primary hold up, McLeroy will remain chairman of the SBOE, but the legislature will be likely to shift against many of the actions he’s pushed since assuming the chair, and may turn antagonistically Democratic.

The stakes are higher for Texas students.

Critics of the process asked the subcommittee to allow an expert in Hispanic culture and language to assess the proposed new standards before a preliminary vote next week by the full education board.

The four-member subcommittee that worked on the curriculum did not include anyone of Hispanic descent, or anyone from South or West Texas, and critics said the committee did not seek advice from anyone with expertise in Hispanic language or culture.

Statewide, 47 percent of the more than 4.6 million public school students are Hispanic. Eighty-nine percent of El Paso County’s 173,000 students are Hispanic.

According to the Texas Education Agency, about 16 percent of students statewide and about 28 percent of students in El Paso County in 2006 had limited English proficiency.

Resources:

• Betsy Oney in the online Pegasus, “Whose interests do these elected officials represent anyway?”
• Houston Chronicle story, “State panel rejects Latino call for input on curriculum“
• KVEO-TV, “Board of Education Looks To Change Curriculum“
• Brownsville, Texas, Monitor, “State board education member urges public to rally for classroom …“
• El Paso Times, “Legislators say education panel lacks Hispanic“
• Draft TEKS ELAR (March 19, 2008) (in .pdf format)

Testing boosts memory, study doesn’t

This is why football players remember the games better than they remember the practices.

Is this really news? It was a jarring reminder to me. Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science (just before his blog was swallowed up by the many-tentacled Seed Magazine empire) noted a study that shows testing improves performance more than study.

But a new study reveals that the tests themselves do more good for our ability to learn that the many hours before them spent relentlessly poring over notes and textbook. The act of repeatedly retrieving and using learned information drives memories into long-term storage, while repetitive revision produced almost no benefits.

More quizzes instead of warm-up studies? More tests? Longer tests? What do you think? Certainly this questions the wisdom of high-stakes, end of education testing; it also calls into question the practice of evaluating teachers solely on the basis of test scores.  Much grist for the discussion mill.

Here’s the citation to the study: Karpicke, J.D., Roediger, H.L. (2008). The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning. Science, 319(5865), 966-968. DOI: 10.1126/science.1152408

Karpicke is at Purdue; Roediger is at Washington University in St. Louis.

Boost geology, boost science education

Kevin Padian’s article in February’s GeoTimes urges improvements in geology in textbooks, as a means of boosting science education and achievement overall.

I don’t want to imply that every geologist should be visiting third-grade classrooms and discussing radiometric dating with the students. That wouldn’t be comfortable for most of us, or most of them. But we can support a strong geological curriculum by getting involved in state and local textbook adoption procedures and curriculum development. Those folks need good scientific advice, and we need to listen to them to see how we can best meet their needs.

I’m actually going to suggest something even easier — something that most of us who teach in colleges and universities do all the time: improve the textbooks we use.

Texas’s state school board is running in exactly the opposite direction, undertaking several initiatives to dumb down science texts, even after approving a requirement for a fourth year of science classes required for graduation.

We can hope Texas’s policy makers will listen to veteran scientist educators like Padian.

Click thumbnail for larger chart to view. Evolution of Tetrapods, courtesy of Kevin Padian.

“Padian is a professor of Integrative Biology and curator in the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley, and president of the National Center for Science Education.”

Troublemaker: Chat with Checker Finn, March 5

With all the irony, implicit and explicit, I will be proctoring a test Wednesday.

You, however, would be well advised to tune into this discussion described below:

This Week’s Live Chat

Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik
When: Wednesday, March 5, 2 p.m., Eastern time
Submit questions in advance.

Please join us for this online chat to get an insider’s view of school-reform movements over the past five decades.

In a new book titled Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik, Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, provides a close-up history of postwar education reform and his own role in it. Mr. Finn, assistant secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, and an aide to politicians as different as Richard Nixon and Daniel Moynihan, recounts how his own experiences have shaped his changing and often contentious views of educational improvement efforts, from school choice to standards-based education to the professionalization of teaching.

For background, please read:
“Lessons Learned: A Self-Styled ‘Troublemaker’ Shares Wisdom Gleaned From 57 Years in Education,” Education Week, February 27, 2008.

[Here's a version that doesn't require a subscription.]

About the guest:

• Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and senior editor of Education Next. He is the author of We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future and many other books.

Submit questions in advance.

No special equipment other than Internet access is needed to participate in this text-based chat. A transcript will be posted shortly after the completion of the chat.

Finn is one of those guys whose views you may not always like, with whom you may not always agree, but to whom you must listen, because you will always learn something from him.

Joseph Juran dead at 103

Anyone in quality control would recognize the name; more people in business will recognize the principles.

Joseph Juran, who made “Six Sigma” a symbol of high quality control and pointed the way to statistical analysis of problems that factory floor workers could understand and use, is dead at 103.

He created the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, which states that 80 percent of consequences stem from 20 percent of causes. Today managers use the Pareto principle, named for an Italian economist, to help them separate what Mr. Juran called the “vital few” resources from the “useful many.”

“Everybody who’s in business now adopts the philosophy of quality management,” David Juran said. “He came along at just the right time. Most of the reference books that have been written about this field are either books that he wrote or imitations.”

Among his best-known works were the “Quality Control Handbook” in 1951, the first mathematically rooted textbook on product quality, now entering its sixth edition, and “Managerial Breakthrough” in 1964, which described a step-by-step improvement process that inspired the Six Sigma and lean manufacturing philosophies.

Perhaps a mark of how far out of favor serious quality control has fallen, the New York Times article makes no mention of other quality control pioneers who worked with Juran, such as W. Edwards Deming, nor does it note the amazingly long list of companies who used the principles to achieve greatness, some of which were later skewered by other economic problems.

And I’ll wager that not one school principal in 1,000 knows who Juran was or how his methods might improve education.

(Photo from publicity still, the same photo used on most of Dr. Juran’s books.)

Meanwhile, back at the school: Carnival!

I always loved school carnivals. The elementary school versions always featured silly games and activities to appeal to kids of third grade mentality — right up my alley! Then I joined the PTA board at our kids’ elementary, and saw the numbers. The annual carnival took in several tens of thousands of dollars. A lot of that money bought new library books, some bought new science programs, all of it went for better education.

I really like a well-run carnival now.  Here are a few well-run carnival events.

Carnival of the Liberals #58 flew to England, at Liberal England. Double the posts, ten from England, ten from the Americas.  Geography and history teachers might be particularly interested in a post at Pickled Politics on whether Australia’s government will follow up with real action following their official apology to the continent’s aboriginals, for past mistreatment.

Will I ever catch up with the Carnival of Education? Teachers ought to browse this weekly — I haven’t looked at it weekly in the past month. Let’s go back to #155: Bluebird’s Classroom has a post about a teachable moment, involving her unit on weather, and the tornado warning that popped up during class. Pay particular attention to her use of the LCD projector and live television link. Odds are that your classroom can’t support such teaching, as mine cannot right now.

The rest of Carnival of Education #155 plays out at Median Sib. But I’m much farther behind. #156 resides at Creating Lifelong Learners. #157 can be found at Colossus of Rhodey. #158 moves in at Instructify. That one features this post (from Creating Lifelong Learners) about using your iPod in class to high purpose. I’ll wager there is not a school of education in the U.S. that teaches iPod use as a tool of classroom control and educational excellence. This is why we need to read these on-line collections. (”Hot 4 Teacher” graphic borrowed from Instructify.)

Geography revolution, next wave: Ready in your classroom?

Depression presents a serious occupational hazard, moving back and forth between the classroom and business, classroom and internet. When do administrators and legislators get serious about catching up education?

Microsoft plans a product announcement at the end of this month. Rumors claim it’s a new version of Photosynth. Photosynth mades “3D” touring by computer possible for almost any destination.

I’ll wager not a single classroom in the nation is ready to make this work. If you disagree, I’d love to hear about the class that can make use of it.

System requirements for Photosynth won’t tax the computers that most high school gamers use, but they are beyond most of the classroom computers I’ve seen in the last five years.

Probably more to the point, curriculum designers in public schools don’t even have Google Earth on their horizons. Photosynth? I’ll wager it’s not even on the radar screens of GIS users in the nation’s Council of Governments (COGS).

Geography is an exploding discipline. GIS and computerized map programs make cell phone companies go, not to mention oil and gas exploration, coal mining, air pollution monitoring (for building new power plants, for example), and road building. GPS helps drive express shipping, and all other shipping. RFI and GPS together are revolutionizing retail.

You must know how to read a map just to get a job delivering pizza.

But 9th grade geography classes? The exciting stuff is absent today.

At the Texas Education Agency (TEA), officials fret about how to stop science from being taught in science classes, for fear the facts will skew the religious beliefs of their children. They need to worry about their children not even getting hired by the pizza delivery company for being ignorant of nature and science, and the maps that show them. In a competitive, technologically savvy world, inaction, dithering and damaging action by the TEA mean our kids won’t even have a prayer.

Relevant posts:

• Explore ancient Rome, in 3-D, from your computer

America by Air, the promise of on-line history education

Looking for something else I found the Smithsonian Institution’s on-line history of air passenger travel in the U.S., America by Air.

I can easily see a time when a student with a computer terminal gets an assignment to look at some of the activities available at a site like America by Air, with on-line quizzes as the student progresses through the exhibits.

How far away are we? Two questions: Does your school provide an internet-linked computer for each student? Do you have the software or technical support to give an on-line assignment and track results?

Teaching stays stuck in the 19th century, learning opportunities fly through the 21st.

Creationism isn’t science

The Waco Tribune published an opinion piece three weeks ago that I should have noted earlier. Trib columnist John Young noted that creationism isn’t science, and that generally creationists are not friends of science education (or any other education, sadly, not even Bible education).

Conditions surrounding Texas science standards, and education standards in general, have deteriorated very rapidly, with the chairman of the State Board of Education going on the warpath against mathematics, English and science teaching. For quick destruction to get the foolishness out of the way, one might hope he’ll go on the warpath against football and cheerleading. I’ve not had time to pass along all the sad details.

But then, not all crazies are stupid.

Earlier:

• Don’t “limit” science classes to evolution
• Politics at Texas Education Agency
• Skirmishes before the war:  Creationist assault on Texas
• Hijacking science in Texas

Struggling schools get struggling teachers

Everyone who knows him thinks highly of him. When the rest of the teachers in the department need help, they turn to him. The school is struggling to achieve the state’s testing standards, and much hope rides on this guy.

So, yesterday in the staff meeting, when he complained the news media were aiming specifically at him, the generally noisy teachers fell suddenly silent.

Studies may be generally accurate, but they are, by nature and design, generalizations. Across Texas yesterday, good teachers in struggling schools took a hit they don’t deserve.

I’m sure that’s not what the authors intended.

See this story in the Dallas Morning News. Check it out in the Houston Chronicle, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

Look at the report, from the Education Trust, here.

So far, I can’t tell if the study said anything about improving conditions for teachers to encourage the good ones to stay in the profession and take the tougher assignments. Conservatives will see this as a call to fire more teachers, I’m sure. Reaction will start any moment now.

Tip of the scrub brush to Aunt Betsy.

Boost test performance: Start school later

Students perform better when schools adjust schedules to accommodate the realities of biology: High school students don’t learn or test well in the morning. Go here for an introductory discussion of the issues.

Of course, in order to boost student performance by starting high school later, bus schedules would have to change. Change costs money. Anyone care to wager whether this quick, proven method for boosting student performance will catch on, considering it costs a little?

12 year-old blogger educates . . .

How young is too young to blog about education?

Our reader, Dr. Pamela Bumsted wrote about a 12 year-old kid in Southern California who blogs to reach underprivileged kids, at The Edublogs Magazine.

Michael Guggenheim is twelve years old, a full-time 6th grade student in southern California. He’s recently won the Volunteer Service Award from Secretary Spelling of the U.S. Department of Education and another award from the Inland Empire Branch of the International Dyslexia/Dysgraphia Association. He’s been interviewed by Good Morning America, the LA Times, and CNN. And he’s a blogger.

Michael Guggenheim uses his blog for education - as a teacher to document his nonprofit organization and his extracurricular activities teaching even younger students how to use a computer.

S.P.L.A.T. Inc. (Showing People Learning And Technology) was set up by Guggenheim to help him tutor youngsters at homeless shelters, low income housing projects, and community centers. Whatever funds he raises goes to the distribution of used computers, monitors, printers, and donated software. He himself teaches basic computer skills and also shows the younger children how to use computer learning games.

Got a classroom blog yet? This kid is ahead of a lot of teachers in blogging.