By DAVID BORNSTEIN JULY 24, 2015 7:00 AM July 24, 2015 7:00 am 91 Comments
Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
In the early 1990s, about 50 kindergarten teachers were asked to rate the social and communication skills of 753 children in their classrooms. It was part of the Fast Track Project, an intervention and study administered in Durham, N.C., Nashville, Seattle and central Pennsylvania. The goals were to understand how children develop healthy social skills, and help them do so.
Using an assessment tool called the “Social Competence Scale,” the teachers were asked to assign each child a score based on qualities that included “cooperates with peers without prompting”; “is helpful to others”; “is very good at understanding feelings”; and “resolves problems on own.”
This month, researchers from Pennsylvania State University and Duke published a study that looked at what had happened to those students in the 13 to 19 years since they left kindergarten. Their findings warrant major attention because the teachers’ rankings were extremely prescient.
They predicted the likelihood of many outcomes: whether the children would graduate from high school on time, get college degrees, have stable or full-time employment as young adults; whether they would live in public housing or receive public assistance; whether they would be held in juvenile detention or be arrested as adults. The kindergarten teachers’ scores also correlated with the number of arrests a young adult would have for severe offenses by age 25.
The researchers had statistically controlled for the effects of poverty, race, having teenage parents, family stress and neighborhood crime, and for the children’s aggression and reading levels in kindergarten.
One major result: Children who scored high on social skills were four times as likely to graduate from college than those who scored low.
Parents stay calm teenagers are not having sex …anymore
Elizabeth Nolan Brown|Jul. 23, 2015 3:15 pm
According to popular culture, today’s teens are a bunch of “hookup”-scarred heathens, trapped in a sordid world of casual flings with one another and exploitation at the hands of online predators. In reality, teenagers today are having less sex than they have for decades. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Center for Health Statistics shows that the number of (unmarried) 15- to 19-year-olds who’ve had sex dropped by 14 percent for girls and 22 percent for boys in the period between 1988 and 2013.
As of 2011-2013, 44 percent of teen girls surveyed and 47 percent of teen boys said they had sexual intercourse—compared to 51 and 60 percent, respectively, of their 1988 counterparts. Or, to put it another way, 4.3 million millennial girls and 4.8 million boys, compared to 5 million and around 6.15 million in the late ’80s. Congratulations, last of the Gen X’ers: you are better than the youngest of the millennial cohort at getting laid.
But kids these days are better about practicing safe sex: 79 percent of the girls surveyed and 84 percent of the boys said they had used some sort of contraceptive method the first time they had sex, with condoms ranking the most popular. In 1988, only 71 percent of male teens and 69 percent of female teens used contraception when they first had sex.
After condoms, the birth control pill and the pull-out method are now the most popular teen contraception choices. Fifty-four percent of 15- to 19-year-old girls surveyed said they had at some point been on the pill, which is similar to the 2002 rate; the rates of contraceptive-implant use (2 percent) and intrauterine device, or IUD, use (3 percent) were also relatively stable.
JULY 23, 2015, 10:33 PM LAST UPDATED: THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2015, 10:36 PM
BY HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
New Jersey received a three-year pass to continue education programs and reforms put in place by the Christie administration, including a new educator evaluation system despised by the teachers union.
The U.S. Department of Education told seven states on Thursday that they had renewed their waivers, letting them continue practices that vary from the federal No Child Left Behind law.
New Jersey’s three-year waiver, approved without conditions, was described by state officials as an “affirmation” that what they’re doing is working.
“New Jersey can take pride knowing that our efforts are leading to real improvements in student learning,” New Jersey Education Commissioner David Hespe said in a news release.
State officials say education reforms are helping to close the achievement gap and give quality educational opportunities to all students. But the state’s largest teachers union, which has publicly sparred with the administration on such issues as pension, evaluations and testing, said the renewal was “pro-forma” and doesn’t mean schools are getting better.
The Ridgewood Board of Education will hold a Regular Public Meeting on Monday, July 20, 2015 at 4 p.m.
The public is invited to attend the meeting at the Ed Center, 49 Cottage Place, Floor 3. The meeting will be aired live on FiOS channel 33 and Optimum channel 77. Or it may be viewed live via the district website at www.ridgewood.k12.nj.us using the “Link in Live” tab.
Click here to view the agenda for the July 20, 2015 Regular Public Meeting.
Ridgewood NJ, Three years after New Jersey’s tenure-reform law was signed, the Christie administration has publicly released the first results of the new teacher-evaluation system, district by district, school by school.The state Department of Education yesterday released data for every school on the number of teachers falling into each category – they were ranked from “ineffective” to “highly effective” — of the new system for 2013-14.We pulled the numbers from the Ridgewood Schools district and this is what we found :
JULY 15, 2015, 7:52 PM LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 2015, 11:01 PM
BY HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
Most teachers across North Jersey got high marks under the state’s evaluation system, although officials cautioned that the system, which is in its first year, is too new to draw conclusions.
Overall, about two dozen districts in Bergen and Passaic counties rated all of their teachers as “effective” or “highly effective,” which are the top ratings out of four categories. Most other districts had a few in the bottom categories of “partially effective” or “ineffective” – ratings that state officials say will prompt intervention and added support for those teachers.
Only Paterson, the region’s lone state-controlled district, had a sizable number of teachers who were rated less than effective, with 16 percent of its nearly 2,000 instructors falling behind, according to state data.
The state released teacher evaluation data Wednesday for the 2013-14 school year, but information for individual schools was mostly absent because of privacy rules designed to hide the identity of teachers. A few small districts also had no data. The ratings were based largely on observations by administrators, but also on student performance on tests and on student improvement.
Peter Shulman, assistant education commissioner and chief talent officer, has said the results from the first year of the new system, called AchieveNJ, were not enough to identify trends or make sweeping conclusions about the state’s teachers. The information, he said, would be used to help the 2,900 teachers who were found to be struggling.
Teacher-Evaluation ratings released for schools around the state
Three years after New Jersey’s tenure-reform law was signed, the Christie administration has publicly released the first results of the new teacher-evaluation system, district by district, school by school. (Mooney/NJ Spotlight)
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Scott Garrett (NJ-05) today voted to give control of our children’s education back to parents, teachers, and school boards by supporting H.R. 5, the Student Success Act. The Student Success Act replaces the current national testing system with state-led accountability measures.
“New Jersey has many of the best schools and educators in the United States, yet the parents I speak to are concerned about the negative impact that federal programs like Common Core are having on the quality of our students’ education. For years, Washington has dangled federal funds in front of states and forced them to adopt their one-size-fits-all standards—this has to stop. The Student Success Act is an important first step towards ending the cycle of federal coercion and allowing New Jersey to determine its own success by returning control to our local school boards, teachers, and parents.”
H.R. 5 also includes a provision originally proposed by Rep. Garrett in 2013 that clarifies that the states are not required to take part in any federal education program, nor are they required to adhere to program requirements should they choose to opt out or are not awarded any funds.
Student Success Act (from Committee on Education and the Workforce):
Eliminates the secretary’s ability to promote the adoption of Common Core or any other particular academic standards or assessments by prohibiting the federal government from tying state adoption to the receipt of federal funds or waivers of K-12 education law.
Prohibits the secretary from influencing in any way the partnerships states form and the assessments states choose to use, thereby ensuring decisions to adopt and implement any particular standards or assessments lie solely with state and local leaders.
Excludes authorization for programs the secretary has used to coerce states to adopt his preferred policies,including Race to the Top.
Prevents the secretary from imposing additional burdens on states and school districts through the regulatory process in areas of standards, assessments, and state accountability plans.
DreamstimeStates that adopted the Common Core national education standards still can’t provide textbooks that actually teach what the standards require. That’s a big problem for students who have to take Core-mandated standardized tests that are misaligned with their teachers’ instructional materials.
An eye-opening investigation by Matt Collette of The Daily Beast reveals that most textbooks don’t fully meet the standards, despite advertising themselves as Core-aligned. Collette consulted EdReports, a non-profit that evaluates textbooks; the group recently reviewed more than 80 textbooks and found that only 11 of them matched Common Core requirements.
Most damning of all was the fact that Pearson—a publishing giant with significant Common Core ties and exclusive contracts to develop testing materials for some Core-compliant states—“had zero textbooks evaluated as being aligned with the Common Core,” according to Collette. This means, in a sense, that the gigantic corporation making the tests is also producing textbooks that don’t teach to those tests.
Additionally ironic—and certainly noteworthy—is the fact the EdReports is funded by the Gates Foundation, an organization that funded and developed the Common Core and lobbied for its widespread adoption. I would thus expect EdReports to air on the side of favorable coverage for Core-related matters. That even a Gates-funded endeavor has serious concerns about textbook compliance suggests to me that concern is indeed merited.
Scott Garrett : I voted today to give control of our children’s education back to parents, teachers, and school boards by supporting H.R. 5, the Student Success Act.
New Jersey has many of the best schools and educators in the United States, yet the parents I speak to are concerned about the negative impact that federal programs like Common Core are having on the quality of our students’ education. For years, Washington has dangled federal funds in front of states and forced them to adopt their one-size-fits-all standards—this has to stop. The Student Success Act is an important first step towards ending the cycle of federal coercion and allowing New Jersey to determine its own success.
Rep. Mark Walker / @repmarkwalker / July 08, 2015
Rep. Mark Walker, a Republican, represents North Carolina’s 6th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Innovation starts locally—not in Washington.
Yet, over the past few years, we have witnessed the unprecedented expansion of the federal government into our classrooms.
Decades of regulations, mandates and rules have been piling up on our educators, but failing to improve our students’ education.
Congress is set to reconsider, and potentially reauthorize, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
This law outlines federal programs for K-12 education and was last reauthorized in 2002 as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which further expanded Washington’s intrusion in our schools by creating new federal mandates.
No Child Left Behind also expired in 2007.
This means the Obama administration has been able to operate without certain limitations and has strong-armed states into complying with its liberal education agenda.
Thankfully, we have the opportunity to get Uncle Sam out of the business of micromanaging our schools from the top-down and return control to our local families, educators and officials.
This week in the House, my colleagues and I are revisiting the way Washington approaches our K-12 federal education policy with consideration of H.R. 5, the Student Success Act.
This bill repeals and reforms many failed education policies like the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) mandate, but I challenge that we can do even better for our children and future generations.
Conservatives have the largest majority in Congress that we have had in years, and we have a real opportunity to stand against Washington’s culture of bureaucracy and make a difference in our federal approach to education—let’s ensure we truly return education decisions back to the local-level.
We all agree that local communities—and ultimately parents—are best equipped to meet the unique needs of each student. Accordingly, they should be able to decide how best to utilize federal funding.
This is why I introduced the Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success (A-PLUS) amendment to the Student Success Act with Rep. Ron DeSantis (FL-06). The A-PLUS amendment would give states maximum flexibility by allowing them to opt-out of federal mandates and programs while retaining federal funding.
We can strengthen the Student Success Act’s goal of removing the federal government from our classrooms with this simple, common sense policy change.
States and taxpayers should be able to keep their dollars, opt-out of federal education programs without repercussion and focus on the needs of their students and communities.
Greater flexibility will yield greater accountability. A-PLUS would truly restore local control of education.
The status quo is failing our children and we need to ensure each child has access to a quality education and the opportunity to achieve their dreams.
Increasing local control of education and empowering parents and children through school choice initiatives is how we break these patterns and foster innovation in our school systems.
A-PLUS would restore state and local control of education and put parents, teachers and school leaders back in the driver’s seat.
JULY 6, 2015, 6:46 AM LAST UPDATED: MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015, 6:51 AM
BY STEPHANIE AKIN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
The kids in the videos punch each other in the face. They pull each other’s hair. They roll on the ground while crowds egg them on. And it all allegedly happened in North Jersey, posted on a new Twitter feed that compiles apparent cellphone videos of young people fighting in New Jersey, with most of the altercations in Bergen and Passaic counties.
The fights shown on @BCountyFights take place in a high school chemistry laboratory, on a street lined with carefully manicured lawns, on the deck of a swimming pool. They are labeled by the location where the brawl allegedly occurred.
The feed’s reach – more than 2,000 followers – is expanding, with high school and middle school students saying they watch it in groups and talk about the latest video to post. And the catalog of fights is growing, with a collection of more than 75 videos posted since the feed went live on June 13.
“It’s like watching a boxing match, but with people you know,” said Brian Heredia, a 16-year-old rising junior at Hackensack High School.
Local school administrators and law enforcement officials, however, said the videos glorify violence and misrepresent their communities.
The feed doesn’t mention that in many cases the people involved faced criminal charges for their behavior. It also provides fodder for future prosecution: Several local police departments have assigned officers to monitor the feed. Although it is not illegal to film or post videos from public places, and Twitter doesn’t have any restrictions on content that viewers may find offensive, people in the videos can be liable for the actions documented in them.
JULY 6, 2015, 8:55 PM LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, JULY 7, 2015, 7:55 AM
BY HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
North Jersey schools have made strides to improve graduation rates and narrow the performance gap among student groups of different races and income levels, state and national reports have shown.
Now concerns are being raised about how proposed changes to federal education law could impact progress in states like New Jersey. Officials and educators largely agree that the federal No Child Left Behind Act needs to be reformed, but they disagree on what a new law should look like.
Federal officials said Monday that proposed bills to overhaul the law lack the accountability needed to make sure struggling students get the help and investments they need, especially in the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools. The officials released a report showing that wide gaps still exist across states, despite improvements in graduation rates and achievement gaps.
“We have to make sure every state develops a structure to identify and help the lowest-performing schools,” Cecilia Munoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said in a phone call with reporters.
JULY 3, 2015 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, JULY 3, 2015, 8:56 AM
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Print
Housing projects would increase school enrollment
To the Editor:
It was hard to read the report in The Ridgewood News of July 26 (“Parents question increase in class sizes,” page A1) of classes with 24 children and the inability of the school board to guarantee that children will be placed in schools close to their homes, without marveling at the recent arrogance of the Ridgewood Planning Board in totally disregarding the concerns and testimony of taxpayers in this regard by passing the high-density zoning for which developers clamored.
These issues go hand in hand. The notion that school-age children will not cascade into these developments is ludicrous. Board of Education President Sheila Brogan is quoted in the article as saying, “Unlike surrounding towns, Ridgewood tends to support more students in our school districts.” Yet, as a proponent of the development on Broad Street, this obvious fact was nowhere in evidence.
The town can only hope that the full council is more attuned to the tremendous costs in traffic, taxes and school crowding that high-density projects will engender. Save the Village. Do not adopt this disastrous recommendation.
As “Pomp and Circumstance” plays at ceremonies nationwide this month, a record number of high school students are celebrating their hard-earned diplomas.
The celebrations won’t last. Despite their hard work, these students will soon find that they’re far from prepared for life after graduation. Academically, they’re worse educated than most of their foreign contemporaries. Occupationally, they’re ill-equipped for the jobs our economy needs. And emotionally, they’re less healthy than any generation in recent history.
America’s K-12 educational system is to blame. Despite huge advances in classroom technology and the science of learning, our nation’s schools remain a relic of another era.
Modernizing our schools isn’t just a matter of changing funding formulas and tweaking mechanisms for accountability. Instead, we must completely reimagine the American model of schooling, drawing on the science- and technology-driven practices that have revolutionized the modern world.
U.S. students are rapidly falling behind their international peers in primary and secondary education. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked countries based on the average math and science scores of 15-year-old students. America’s schools came in 28th.
Even worse, the OECD found that almost a quarter of American 15-year-olds failed to acquire “basic skills” in math and science. Of the 76 countries evaluated in the study, only Luxembourg performed worse.
This poor academic performance translates directly into inadequate workforce skills, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM. Because of a lack of qualified applicants, companies take more than twice as long to fill STEM positions than equivalent non-STEM ones. The problem will only worsen. STEM positions are projected to grow 17 percent by 2024, almost double the rate of non-STEM jobs.
As if leaving students undereducated and unprepared for the workforce isn’t enough, current school practices are also making students psychologically unhealthy. The incidence of anxiety and depression among American adolescents has reached alarming levels. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly one in five high school kids contemplated suicide in 2013, many due to stress from school.
If we are going to reverse these dangerous trends, we need to completely change the way we teach our young people.
That starts by acknowledging that every student is different, and that the same student can be different depending on the week, the month, and the year. As a result, students need an education customized to their evolving individual needs.
This idea is far from new. Individualized teaching has long been recognized as superior to standard one-size-fits-all instruction. A 1984 study showed that individually tutored students, on average, performed better than 98 percent of students educated in a standard setting.
The problem is that such tutoring has long been prohibitively expensive. But with the advent of new technology, programs such as Khan Academy and Coursera are demonstrating that personalized, self-directed learning is possible on a large scale.
That could mean a classroom full of students using laptops or tablets to learn at their own pace. Or teachers using technology to closely track individual student progress so they know when to step in and help.
Once students master foundational core knowledge and skill requirements, they need resources and time to pursue their own projects, internships, and other opportunities for applied learning.
Rather than trudge through unnecessary extra English courses, a science-lover should be able to spend her time in the laboratory. By the same token, an aspiring writer should be encouraged to work on the novel kicking around in his head rather than taking unwanted extra science courses. It’s amazing what teenagers are capable of if they are given agency and a little direction.
Apart from academics, schools should address students’ emotional and social growth. For too long, a skeptical public has brushed aside concepts like socio-emotional learning as hippie nonsense. But in this case, the hippies have it right. Those who embrace these concepts experience very real, measurable benefits — including enhanced academic achievement.
For example, in January, Developmental Psychology published a study of grade-school students who were taught meditation and mindfulness techniques. After 12 weeks, the students showed a 24 percent decrease in aggression and an overall reduction in depression-like symptoms — plus a 15 percent improvement in math scores!
We’ve all winced at the numbers. U.S. students rank 17th, 26th, and 21st on the reading, math, and science portions of the PISA exam – well below many of their international peers.
But even while we recognize that these numbers are bad, many of us secretly reassure ourselves that such is not the case with the local schools which our children attend. Surely the American children struggling to keep up with the rest of the world are in other communities besides our own, right?
Not necessarily. As recent test scores demonstrate, students from well-to-do suburban and rural areas might not be doing as well as we imagine.
A case in point is the Kettle Moraine school district, located on the outskirts of Milwaukee. The district’s superintendent describes Kettle Moraine as “‘a very good school district.’” In this district, “only about 10 percent of the 1,300 students at Kettle Moraine High qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and about 90 percent are white.” And with the high graduation rates and ACT test scores which many of its students achieve, one would have to agree that Kettle Moraine’s students seem to be ahead of the pack.
However, Kettle Moraine recently had the opportunity to take the OECD Test for Schools, an exam which channels the official PISA test, but adapts it for individual American schools to see how competitive they are on the global stage. As it turns out, students from the high-achieving Kettle Moraine district weren’t leading the global pack in a key area. They were behind.
RHS Class of 1978 member Carrie McIndoe is running the program. Sounds like there is still time for some entrepreneurial RHS students. If not this summer, then keep the idea in mind for next summer.
Scholarships Available for High School Entrepreneurship Camp
Jun 24, 2015
Full Scholarships are available to the EntrePrep℠ Summer Institute, a one-week residential experiential entrepreneurship program for a diverse population of rising high school juniors and seniors. The program will be held July 12-18, 2015 at the University of Delaware, Newark and August 9-15, 2015 at Skidmore College, Saratoga, NY.
Program
In this intensive program, the participants experience being entrepreneurs. They work towards launching and operating their own Business-for-a-Day™, with over 20 hours of training and mentoring in support of this undertaking. They brainstorm, identify ideas and opportunities and develop them into their own Business-for-a-Day™.
They assemble the resources needed to launch their businesses and then run them. These young entrepreneurs deliver a ‘Concept versus Reality’ analysis in a final presentation before a live audience of their peers, mentors, local community and business advisors.
The students learn and implement economic/financial concepts and key life
skills, all required to create, run and evaluate their businesses. They experience the entrepreneurial mindset.
The program provides preparation for the future. The knowledge and skills students learn by this direct experience, helps prepare them for the world they are entering – one where understanding of economic concepts and financial literacy is a must and where most jobs are created by small businesses.
This is a unique opportunity to participate in a transformative experience.
For more information contact: Carrie McIndoe 917-650-3929 www.econventures.org
