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America’s students as a whole lag behind many other industrialized nations on international tests. Government expenditures on K-12 education have more than doubled over the last 40 years (adjusted for inflation), and yet U.S. students’ academic performance at the end of high school is flat.
Learn more:
Three education tips to grow a young mind.
Annie Holmquist | January 15, 2016
It’s no secret that American students are sadly falling behind. One look at the Nation’s Report Card tells us that not even half of students at the 4th, 8th, or 12th grade levels are able to achieve proficiency in math, reading, history, or any number of other subjects.
To an outsider, such scores would lead to the conclusion that American students are dumb.
But American children are not dumb; instead, they are the victims of education methods which fail to inspire true learning.
In 1923, British educator Charlotte Mason penned a work entitled Towards A Philosophy of Education. In it, she posited that children have far greater intellectual ability than adults give them credit for:
“Our schools turn out a good many clever young persons, wanting in nothing but initiative, the power of reflection and the sort of moral imagination that enables you to ‘put yourself in his place.’ These qualities flourish upon a proper diet; and this is not afforded by the ordinary school book, or, in sufficient quantity by the ordinary lesson.”
So how do we give this “proper educational diet” to our children? Ms. Mason suggests three ways:
1. Avoid Regurgitating Facts
“But the children ask for bread and we give them a stone; we give information about objects and events which mind does not attempt to digest but casts out bodily (upon an examination paper?). But let information hang upon a principle, be inspired by an idea, and it is taken with avidity and used in making whatsoever in the spiritual nature stands for tissue in the physical.”
2. Read books
“[A]s soon as a young child begins his education he does so as a student. Our business is to give him mind-stuff, and both quality and quantity are essential. Naturally, each of us possesses this mind-stuff only in limited measure, but we know where to procure it; for the best thought the world possesses is stored in books; we must open books to children, the best books; our own concern is abundant provision and orderly serving.”
3. Avoid Excessive Explanation
“I believe that all children bring with them much capacity which is not recognized by their teachers, chiefly intellectual capacity, (always in advance of motor power), which we are apt to drown in deluges of explanation or dissipate in futile labours in which there is no advance.”
Is it time we cultivate the intellectual abilities of American children and give them an education which actually encourages their minds to grow?
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/are-schools-squelching-intelligence-american-children
By Bradford Richardson
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) says real education reform is impossible as long as teachers unions remain a powerful force for the status quo.
“The single most destructive force for public education in this country is the teachers union,” Christie said at a Jack Kemp Foundation panel discussion in Columbia, S.C., on Saturday. “It is the single most destructive force.”
The Republican presidential candidate called the labor groups an “absolute subsidiary of the Democratic Party.”
“In New Jersey alone, the teachers union has 200,000 members, and they collect mandatory dues of $730 per person per year,” he said. “That’s $140 million that the teachers union just in New Jersey collects a year, and they pay nothing toward teacher salary, teacher pension or teachers healthcare.
“It’s a $140 million political slush fund to be able to reward their friends and punish their enemies,” he added. “Now imagine that kind of force and it’s replicated in state after state after state in this country.”
Christie said Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is “bought and paid for” by the unions. Clinton has been endorsed by the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the nation.
The governor also called the current mode of education “obsolete” and said schools need to incorporate innovative technologies into the classroom.
Aaaand Another Study Says Preschool Hurts, Not Helps
Annie Holmquist | October 1, 2015
All of the good arguments for Pre-K education seem to be dropping like flies.
One of principal arguments of Pre-K advocates is that it will ensure future academic success for students. But a recent study from the Peabody Research Institute at Vanderbilt University shows that any benefits of Pre-K soon disappear.
Peabody studied Tennessee’s state-funded Voluntary Prekindergarten program, which began in 2009 and particularly caters to children from low-income families. The study discovered the following:
In both the behavioral and academic arenas, preschool attendees were better prepared to enter kindergarten than their non-preschool classmates.
By the end of kindergarten, the non-preschool students caught up to their preschool attending peers, leaving no differencebetween the two groups in terms of academic achievement.
By the end of 1st grade, preschool attendees were found to be behind their peers in a number of non-cognitive/behavioral measurements.
During 2nd and 3rd grade, students who had not attended preschool were actually performing better academically than preschool attendees, particularly in math.
Universal preschool has long been touted as the silver bullet which will close achievement gaps and set children on the path to success. But studies are increasingly beginning to show that preschool has minimal, if any, benefits for children. Is it time to hit the pause button before more states charge ahead to fund preschool for all?
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/aaaand-another-study-says-preschool-hurts-not-helps
New York State Task Force recommends overhauling Common Core and adopting new, high quality, locally-driven New York State-specific designed standards
Task Force also recommends reducing over-testing to reduce anxiety
Governor Cuomo announced the final report and recommendations of the Common Core Task Force – a diverse group of educators, parents, education officials and state representatives – which was charged with comprehensively reviewing and making recommendations on reforming the current Common Core system and the way we teach and test our students. The Task Force recommends overhauling the current Common Core system and adopting new, locally-driven New York State standards in a transparent and open process to make sure all students are prepared to succeed in an increasingly competitive 21st century economy. The new standards, curriculum and tests must be uniquely developed for New York students with sufficient local input. The Task Force also recommends that current Common Core aligned tests should not count for students or teachers until the start of 2019-2020 school year to ensure the system is implemented completely and properly to avoid the errors caused by the prior flawed implementation.
Governor Cuomo said: “After listening to thousands of parents, educators and students, the Task Force has made important recommendations that include overhauling the Common Core, adopting new locally-designed high quality New York standards, and greatly reducing testing and testing anxiety for our students. The Common Core was supposed to ensure all of our children had the education they needed to be college and career-ready – but it actually caused confusion and anxiety. That ends now. Today, we will begin to transform our system into one that empowers parents, teachers and local districts and ensures high standards for all students. I thank the Task Force members for their thorough work. Together we will ensure that New York’s schools provide the world-class education that our children deserve.”
The Task Force was chaired by Richard Parsons, Senior Advisor, Providence Equity Partners, LLC and former Chairman of Citigroup.
Richard Parsons said: “While adoption of the Common Core was extremely well intentioned, its implementation has caused confusion and upheaval in classrooms across New York State. We believe that these recommendations, once acted on, provide a means to put things back on the right track and ensure high quality standards that meet the needs of New York’s kids. The recommendations will provide the foundation to restore public trust in the education system in New York and build on the long history of excellence that preceded this period. On behalf of all the Task Force members, I thank everyone who submitted feedback during our review, as well as the Governor for providing us with this opportunity to improve the education system for students across New York State.”
The Task Force heard from more than 2,100 students, parents, teachers, administrators and other education stakeholders through public forums held across the state, thousands of pages of testimony and outreach to educators.
The Task Force affirmed the importance of maintaining the highest quality standards and performance measures in education. However, the Task Force found that over the past decade there has been rapid change in education, including the 2009 federal Race to the Top and Common Core which has created confusion and disruption in states across the nation, including New York. Moreover, the original process to adopt and implement the Common Core standards, curriculum and tests in New York had implementation issues and failed to include sufficient input from educators, parents and local districts and was not open and transparent.
To ensure that the State moves forward with high quality education standards the Task Force made 21 recommendations including:
Overhauling the Common Core and adopting locally-driven high quality New York education standards with input from local districts, educators, and parents through a transparent and open process that are age-appropriate and allow educators flexibility for Students with Disabilities and English Language Learners.
Establishing a transparent and open process by which New York standards are periodically reviewed by educators and content area experts, since educators know their schools and students best.
Providing educators and local school districts with the flexibility to develop and tailor curriculum to meet the needs of their individual students and requiring the State to create and release new and improved curriculum resources that educators can then adapt to meet the needs of their individual students.
Engaging New York educators, not a private corporation, to drive the review and creation of State standards-aligned tests in an open and transparent manner.
Minimizing student testing anxiety by reducing the number of test days and test questions and providing ongoing test transparency to parents, teachers and districts on test questions and student test scores.
Ensuring that State tests account for different types of learners, including Students with Disabilities and English Language Learners.
The Task Force found that to implement the new system would require significant work including a comprehensive review of the current Common Core Standards in order to adopt new New York State Standards and create new curriculum and assessments in an open and transparent manner for the nearly 700 school districts, 5,000 schools, 200,000 plus teachers and 2.65 million students. Therefore, the Task Force believes that in order to finally get the system right there must be adequate time to implement the system. Given all of the work and time required to review and adopt new standards, improve and adapt curriculum, and create new assessments, any current Common Core aligned tests should not count for students or teachers until the start of 2019-2020 school year when the new statewide standards developed through this process will be put into place.
Senate Majority Leader John J. Flanagan said: “Today’s task force report is another step forward in our overall efforts to ensure that New York’s educational system is both student-centric and parent-centric. These reforms will build on what we have already done to ease the anxiety that exists in many classrooms across the state while reinforcing the importance of high standards. I thank Senator Marcellino for his contributions and look forward to discussing this report with the Governor, the Assembly, and all of the various stakeholders across this state.”
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said: “While there is still much work left to be done, this report is a good first step in our efforts to improve New York’s educational standards and overhaul Common Core. The Assembly has long fought for the principles underlying the report’s recommendations. I thank Assembly Education Chair Cathy Nolan for her hard work on the Commission, and we look forward to working with parents, students, teachers, principals, superintendents, school board members and advocates in our effort to ensure that New York has the best education system possible. Our children deserve nothing less.”
New York State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said: “The Task Force has adopted many if not most of the Board of Regents’ recommendations for improving the implementation of the higher standards we’ve set for our students. The most important message in the Task Force report is the renewed commitment to adopting and maintaining higher standards. We cannot turn our backs on our students at a time when the world is demanding more from them – more skills, more knowledge, more problem-solving.”
New York State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia said: “In my first few months as commissioner, I’ve traveled across the state and heard a large cross section of New Yorkers — our teachers, parents and educators –share their deep concern for improving the education of our children. And as a member of the Common Core Task Force, I’ve heard those same stakeholders express those same concerns. Likewise, the Department’s AimHighNY survey unfolded the same passionate call for clear learning standards to serve as guideposts to future success for our children. Now it’s time to move forward and deliver on the promise we’ve made to our students and give them the best schools possible.”
The comprehensive report provides the history and context of learning standards and specifically, a review of the Common Core Standards in New York; a summary of testimony and stakeholder feedback across several categories and specific Task Force responses; and a full description of Task Force Recommendations.
The Education Transformation Act of 2015 will remain in place, and no new legislation is required to implement the recommendations of the report, including recommendations regarding the transition period for consequences for students and teachers. During the transition, the 18 percent of teachers whose performance is measured, in part, by Common Core tests will use different local measures approved by the state, similar to the measures already being used by the majority of teachers.
The report builds on the Governor’s longstanding commitment to education reform, including the recent laws together with the Legislature banning standardized testing for students in pre-kindergarten through 2nd grade, capping test preparation to two percent of learning time, not counting the Common Core scores against students and requiring the State Education Department to help districts eliminate unnecessary standardized tests for all other students.
In 2008, the High School Redesign Taskforce stated: “…the New Jersey High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA) does not measure college or work readiness…Further, New Jersey colleges and universities do not use scores from the HSPA for admissions or placement, because the test does not reflect postsecondary placement requirements.”
Recommendation: A System of Aligned Assessments “Replace HSPA with a series of end of course assessments in math… and a proficiency exam in language arts literacy that are aligned with the expectations of higher education and the workplace.” (HSRSC – 2008) Current tests should be “replaced with a system of end-of-course assessments.” (CCRT – 2012)
NEW JERSEY’S STATEWIDE ASSESSMENT PROGRAM
¡ In 2015, New Jersey adopted the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) to replace HSPA and previous assessments in elementary and middle schools in language arts and mathematics.
¡ 773,710 NJ Students took PARCC English Language Arts and Literacy Assessments (ELA/L) in Grades 3–11.
¡ 745,606 NJ Students took PARCC Mathematics Assessments in grades 3 – 8 and End of Course Assessments in Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II.
WHAT IS PARCC MEASURING?
A continuum of college readiness at each grade level, based on expectations for skill and knowledge acquisition ideal for annual progress toward graduating high school, ready to do college level work.
¡ Expectations are aligned to the grade-level, academic standards to which we write our curriculum and teach our students – the CCSS
¡ Other tests that measure a continuum of college readiness include: ADP, NAEP, ACT, SAT among others
PARCC Testing Presentation is now Online
Click here to view the PARCC testing presentation given at the December 7 Board meeting by Cheryl Best, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment.
NOVEMBER 16, 2015 LAST UPDATED: MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY DEENA YELLIN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
Advanced Placement courses are all the rage in New Jersey this school year, with many high schools having added more of the college-level courses to meet surging demand.
Students and advocates of the courses cite their value as college preparation, and parents hope to save on the cost of college credits earned for free in high school.
But critical observers also are pointing to the amplified stress that AP courses put on already high-achieving students with packed schedules.
The courses, which lend cachet to a student’s résumé, have long been a staple across the nation. But now, many North Jersey schools, including those in Northern Valley Regional High School District and in Lodi, Bergenfield, Tenafly, Wayne, Emerson and Glen Rock, have launched additional AP courses.
The most popular have traditionally been AP English Literature and AP U.S. History, said staff of the College Board, which administers the AP tests and trains teachers. But school administrators cite a dramatic increase in the number of AP STEM courses added over the past few years, including at Northern Valley High School, which has launched AP physics, science, and computer science; Emerson, which added AP Physics I and II; and Glen Rock, which is adding AP computer science.
New Jersey students have done particularly well on the AP exams, with more than 72.8 percent scoring a 3 or higher — out of 5 — on AP exams in 2015, compared with the average of 60.5 percent internationally.
https://www.northjersey.com/news/education/students-load-up-on-tougher-courses-1.1456207
2015 Ridgewood District-wide Science Testing Report
Click here to read the District-wide State Testing Report for Science 2014-2015, presented to the Board of Education on October 19, 2015 by the Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment, Cheryl Best.
BY JENNIFER C. KERR
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) — Results from national math and reading tests show slipping or stagnant scores for the nation’s schoolkids.
Math scores were down for fourth and eighth graders over the last two years. And reading grades were not much better: flat for fourth graders and lower for eighth graders, according to 2015 results released Wednesday for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam.
The falling mathematics scores for fourth and eighth graders mark the first declines in math since 1990.
The results suggest students have a ways to go to demonstrate a solid grasp or mastery in reading and math.
Only about a third of the nation’s eighth-graders were at proficient or above in math and reading. Among fourth graders, the results were slightly better in reading and in math, about two in five scored proficient or above.
The report also found a continuing achievement gap between white and black students.
There were a few bright spots: the District of Columbia and Mississippi both saw substantial reading and math gains.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged parents, teachers, and others not to panic about the scores as states embrace higher academic standards, such as Common Core.
“We should expect scores in this period to bounce around some, and I think that ‘implementation dip’ is part of what we’re seeing here,” Duncan said in a phone call with reporters. “I would caution everyone to be careful about drawing conclusions.”
Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, echoed Duncan.
“One year does not make a trend,” Minnich said at a panel discussion Wednesday. “We set this new goal for the country of college and career readiness for all kids. Clearly, these results today show we’re not quite there yet and we have some work to do.”
The Common Core standards were developed by the states with the support of the administration. They spell out what students should know in English and math at each grade level, with a focus on critical thinking and less of an emphasis on memorization. But they have become a rallying point for critics who want a smaller federal role in education and some parents confounded by some of the new concepts being taught.
The NAEP tests, also known as the “nation’s report card,” don’t align completely with Common Core, but NAEP officials said there was “quite a bit” of overlap between the tests and the college-ready standards.
10/27/2015 06:05 PM ET
Indoctrinated: Some can recall a time when our campuses of higher education were zones where free speech thrived. That was another era, though. Today’s students want speech restricted. How did it come to this?
The results of a poll that should be shocking, but sadly aren’t, show that 51% of students favor their “college or university having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty.”
Oddly, 95% say that “the issue of free speech” is important at their college or university, while 73% believe that the First Amendment is “an important amendment that still needs to be followed and respected in today’s society.” Only 21% told the Buckley Free Speech Survey that it is “outdated” and “can no longer be applied in today’s society and should be changed.”
Maybe these findings are not so odd, after all. In today’s America, “free speech” and “First Amendment rights” tend not to include any expression that doesn’t conform to left-wing ideology.
Seven years ago, almost two entire college generations in the past, the Acton Institute observed, “Students at colleges and universities who articulate conservative and traditional views are at particular risk of bullying and indoctrination by campus administrators and faculty who are zealous ideologues.”
Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: https://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/102715-777695-politically-correct-conditioning-starts-when-kids-are-young.htm#ixzz3psV4RWsp
By Abby Jackson
In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark, New Jersey’s failing public-school system with the intention of turning around the schools in five years.
The goals Zuckerberg set out to achieve — to enact a number of reforms that would make Newark a model city for education reform — are widely seen as a failure, journalist Dale Russakoff told Business Insider.
So where exactly did that $100 million go if the turnaround was a failure?
Russakoff mapped the money trail in her new book “The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools,” which tracked the five years since Zuckerberg’s donation.
The $100 million from Zuckerberg actually became $200 million under the agreement other sources would match his contribution. Here’s where that money went:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerbergs-100-million-donation-155608055.html
Daniel Lattier | June 12, 2015
This week, an impressive list of scholars across the nation published a letter opposing the new framework for the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) exam in U.S. History. You can read the full letter here.
As you may know, millions of U.S. high school students take an AP U.S. History course and exam each year in the hopes of earning college credit. The new framework of the exam is designed to shape the course curriculum.
The scholars’ problems with the new framework include the following:
It takes away teachers’ previous freedom with the curriculum and “centralizes control, deemphasizes content, and promotes a particular interpretation of American history.”
The historical view it promotes “downplays American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.”
The framework is organized around the theme of “identity-group conflict… while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s ideals and political institutions, notably the Constitution.”
It shifts away from the previous framework’s emphasis on American exceptionalism and national character in favor of an emphasis on “the formation of gender, class, racial and ethnic identities.”
Those with similar concerns are often met with the straw man argument that they wish to turn a blind eye to the past sins committed by Americans. Fortunately, the scholars anticipated this argument in their letter:
“We do not seek to reduce the education of our young to the inculcation of fairy tales, or of a simple, whitewashed, heroic, even hagiographical nationalist narrative. Instead, we support a course that fosters informed and reflective civic awareness, while providing a vivid sense of the grandeur and drama of its subject.”
The concerns raised in the scholars’ letter are not new to me. I brought up similar ones in an article last year on Minnesota’s U.S. history standards, which you can read here. I have provided these standards below:
https://www.better-ed.org/blog/scholars-protest-new-ap-us-history-standards
May 16, 2015
CATO INSTITUTE
The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization — a think tank – dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace. Its scholars and analysts conduct independent, nonpartisan research on a wide range of policy issues. Archive»
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The latest results of the Nation’s Report Card for history, geography, and civics are out, and as usual they are depressing.
The exam, formally known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is administered to a representative sample of U.S. students to give a snapshot of student performance in a variety of subjects nationwide. Education Week reports:
The nation’s eighth graders have made no academic progress in U.S. history, geography or civics since 2010, according to the latest test results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Fewer than one-third of students scored proficient or better on any of the tests and only 3 percent or fewer scored at the advanced level in any of the three subjects.
However, Chad Aldeman of Bellwether Education Partners argues that saying students “have made no academic progress” is “the wrong way to look at it” because of something called Simpson’s Paradox (which has nothing to do with the voice of Principal Skinner and Mr. Burns turning down a $14 million contract):
Because NAEP takes a representative sample, it’s also vulnerable to something called Simpson’s Paradox, a mathematical paradox in which the composition of a group can create a misleading overall trend. As the United States population has become more diverse, a representative sample picks up more and more minority students, who tend to score lower overall than white students. That tends to make our overall scores appear flat, even as all of the groups that make up the overall score improve markedly.
Recent NAEP results in history, geography, and civics illustrate this trend once again. Education Week reported that scores were “flat” from 2010 to 2014. That’s mostly true—the scores were all higher than in 2010 but didn’t meet the standard for statistical significance. But scores are up over longer periods of time. Here are the gains since 2001 on geography (* signifies statistically significant):
• All students: +1
• White students: +4*
• Black students: +7*
• Hispanic students: +9*
• Students with disabilities: +8*
• English Language Learners: +7
… A few things jump out from these longer-term results. First, overall scores are up a little bit, but particular groups of students are making big gains. One rule of thumb suggests that 10–15 points on the NAEP translates into one grade level. Applying that here, scores for most groups of students have improved by roughly a full grade level over the last 15 years or so. Second, achievement gaps are closing as lower-performing groups are catching up to higher-performing ones. Third, Simpson’s Paradox makes the overall scores look relatively “flat.” Don’t let that mislead you. Although we might wish for faster progress, American achievement scores are rising.
However, other education policy experts have cast a gimlet eye on this interpretation. Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas argues, “It is not appropriate to explain away the lack of aggregate progress in academic achievement by referencing Simpson’s Paradox and dis-aggregating results by racial/ethnic group.” In a blog post on the mis-use of Simpson’s Paradox a few years ago, Greene wrote:
The unstated argument behind the use of Simpson’s Paradox to explain the lack of educational progress [is that] minority students are more difficult to educate and we have more of them, so holding steady is really a gain.
The problem with this is that it only considers one dimension by which students may be more or less difficult to educate —race. And it assumes that race has the same educational implications over time. Unless one believes that minority students are more challenging because they are genetically different [which, Greene notes, he does not think Aldeman believes], we have to think about race/ethnicity differently over time as the host of social and economic factors that race represents changes. Being African-American in 1975 is very different from being African-American in 2008. (Was a black president even imaginable back then?) So, the challenges associated with educating minority students three decades ago were almost certainly different from the challenges today.
If we want to see whether students are more difficult to educate over time, we’d have to consider more than just how many minority students we have. We’d have to consider a large set of social and economic variables, many of which are associated with race. Greg Forster and I did this in a report for the Manhattan Institute in which we tracked changes in 16 variables that are generally held to be related to the challenges that students bring to school. We found that 10 of those 16 factors have improved, so that we would expect students generally to be less difficult to educate.
In addition, my Cato colleague Andrew Coulson—creator of the infamous chart below—expressed skepticism about using the main NAEP assessment (which changes between test administrations) to analyze long-term trends. Instead, he points to the NAEP’s “Long-Term Trend” series that was designed just for that purpose. Unlike the main NAEP assessment, the Long-Term Trend remains relatively unchanged over time. Sadly, the results are bleak:
It is true that both black and Hispanic students now score higher than they did in the early 1970s, and the difference isn’t negligible as it is with the overall aggregate trend. … The trends for white students, who still make up the majority of test takers, are only marginally better than the overall trends. Whites gained four points in each of reading and math, and lost six points in science. The overall picture for whites is thus also essentially a flat line, and it is their performance that is chiefly responsible for the stagnation in the overall average scores, not the increasing participation of historically lower-scoring groups.
In short, there is little evidence that Simpson’s Paradox explains flat U.S. student performance in the last few decades.
https://eagnews.org/report-card-no-significant-academic-gains-in-u-s-history-civics-since-2010/
BY JASON W. STEVENS
There’s a delightful and true saying, often attributed to Joseph Sobran, that in a hundred years, we’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.
Now comes even more evidence of the steady decline of American educational standards.
Last year, Annie Holmquist, a blogger for better-ed.org, discovered a 1908 curriculum manual in the Minnesota Historical Society archives that included detailed reading lists for various grade levels.
According to her research, the recommended literature list for 7th and 8th graders in Minnesota in 1908included the following:
LA Schools’ $1 Billion iPad Fiasco Ends After Corruption Revelations
Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……………………..
Robby Soave|Aug. 27, 2014 1:55 pm
Los Angeles Unified School District is ending its billion-dollar iPad program, which has drawn widespread criticism for distributing expensive devices to teachers who didn’t know what to do with them and students who kept losing or breaking them.
The costly program was considered a total failure, and it’s little surprise that district officials have finally relented and scaled back. More surprising, however, are revelations that District Superintendent John Deasy may have engaged in some crooked bargaining to arrange the deal in the first place.
According to The Los Angeles Times, Deasy’s previous connections to Apple and Pearson—the companies contracted to supply the iPads and instructional materials for them, respectively—amount to a conflict of interest. In hindsight, the bidding process that Apple and Pearson won to score the contracts seems biased in those companies’ favor,The LA Times notes:
Last week, a draft report of a district technology committee, obtained by The Times, was strongly critical of the bidding process.
Among the findings was that the initial rules for winning the contract appeared to be tailored to the products of the eventual winners — Apple and Pearson — rather than to demonstrated district needs. The report found that key changes to the bidding rules were made after most of the competition had been eliminated under the original specifications.
In addition, the report said that past comments or associations with vendors, including Deasy, created an appearance of conflict even if no ethics rules were violated.
Emails obtained by The LA Times show Jaime Aquino, Deasy’s deputy superintendent, advising Pearson officials on how to win the bid.
https://reason.com/blog/2014/08/27/la-schools-1-billion-ipad-fiasco-ends-af
Maybe Johnny Can’t Read Because These Workers Crowd Out Teachers
Kelsey Harkness / @kelseyjharkness / August 13, 2014
Teachers and other staff hold a ‘back to school’ meeting at K.W. Barrett Elementary School in Arlington, Va. (Photo: K.W. Barrett/Creative Commons)
Half of America’s public school employees aren’t classroom teachers, according to a new study. Instead, they’re non-teaching personnel such as instructional aides, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, secretaries, and librarians.
It hasn’t always been this way.
The study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit think tank specializing in education policy, found that the number of non-teaching staff grew by 130 percent from 1970 to 2010. Their salaries and benefits account for one-quarter of current education spending.
To show where each state is on the spectrum between least and most non-teaching personnel per 1,000 students, Fordham created this map:
Chart: Thomas B. Fordham Institute
So why are non-teachers on the rise? The Fordham Institute left that up to school district and state education officials to explain.
By using national, state, and local data, though, “The Hidden Half: School Employees Who Don’t Teach” attempts to draw attention to what some education experts consider an alarming trend.
By a wide margin, Nevada and South Carolina public schools had the fewest non-teaching workers per 1,000 students, at 26 and 28 respectively, the study found. Virginia, Vermont, and Wyoming had the most at 104, as the chart below shows.
Lindsey Burke, the Will Skillman Fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation, argues for reducing the number of non-instructional and administrative positions in public schools:
States should consider cutting costs in areas that are long overdue for reform and pursue systemic reform to improve student achievement. Specifically, states should refrain from continuing to increase the number of non-teaching staff in public schools.
Michael Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute, told The Daily Signal that the results of the study should encourage policymakers to “raise tough questions about whether these trends are helping or hurting children.”
Among the most significant findings of “The Hidden Half’,” the authors say in a release on the study:
Since 1950, school staffing has increased nearly 400 percent, and non-teaching personnel played a major part in that growth. Passage of several pieces of federal legislation — Section 504, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, and Title IX (Equal Opportunity in Education Act) — likely were instrumental in changing the makeup of schools.
America spends far more on non-teaching staff (as a percentage of education spending) than do most of the nation’s economic peers in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. spends more than double what Korea, Mexico, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, and Spain do. Only Denmark spends more.
States vary in staffing their schools, but much of the variation is because of differences within their borders. States with a large proportion of the population living in cities tend to have fewer workers per student. (See chart below.)
The category of teacher aides has been the largest gainer over the past 40 years. From 1970 to 2010, aides went from nearly non-existent to the largest group of workers other than teachers.
School districts vary greatly in number of employees, but the differences likely stem from staffing decisions made by leaders. Although factors such as location (rural, suburban, urban) and number of students in special education matter, they don’t explain most of the variation across school districts.
