November « 2010 « thelearner.com

By George Wood, The Forum for Education and Democracy

After the election of 2008, I thought the stars were aligning for some serious changes in the way the federal government treated public schools.

Gone were the architects of No Child Left Behind. A president who had repeatedly said we should not judge schools or children on the basis of one test was elected to office. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was up for reauthorization, and I was hopeful things would change.

I did not mind waiting while other issues took stage, because I liked most of what was going on. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, health-care reform, getting higher education student loans out of the hands of the banks, a recovery act, and much more. Schools were provided a generous slice of the recovery dollars – not just once, but twice– and that money kept the budget ax from falling on my school.

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By Kentaro Toyama, in The Boston Review

A ten-year-old boy named Dhyaneshwar looked up for approval after carefully typing the word “Alaska” into a PC.

“Bahut acchaa!” I cheered—“very good.”

It was April, 2004, and I was visiting a “telecenter” in the tiny village of Retawadi, three hours from Mumbai. The small, dirt-floored room, lit only by an open aluminum doorway, was bare except for a desk, a chair, a PC, an inverter, and a large tractor battery, which powered the PC when grid electricity was unavailable. Outside, a humped cow chewed on dry stalks, and a goat bleated feebly.

As I encouraged the boy, I wondered about the tradeoff his parents had made in order to pay for a typing tutor. Their son was learning to write words he’d never use, in a language he didn’t speak. According to the telecenter’s owner, Dhyaneshwar’s parents paid a hundred rupees—about $2.20—a month for a couple hours of lessons each week. That may not sound like much, but in Retawadi, it’s twice as much as full-time tuition in a private school.

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From YouTube

Teachers Talk Back is a project focused on giving teachers a forum for discussing the current state of education. David Green is the first person to speak for the project.

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By John McWhorter, in NPR

Last week the media dutifully reported the typically depressing news about black boys’ scholarly chops from the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) survey. More than three times as many white fourth-grade boys as black ones read proficiently or better. By eighth grade, white boys are doing almost four times as well as black ones in math.

Numbers, though, cannot always speak to us as clearly as words: The most depressing result in the survey is that inner-city black boys generally do worse in the aggregate than white boys with learning disabilities.

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By Sam Dillon, in The New York Times

Reading scores for the nation’s 12th-grade students have increased somewhat since they dropped to a historic low in 2005, according to results of the largest federal test, released on Thursday. Average math scores also ticked upward.

Experts said the increases, after years of dismal achievement reports, were surprising because every year the nation’s schools are educating more black and Hispanic students, who on average score lower than whites and Asians.

The black-white achievement gap dates back more than a century, though researchers debate why it persists today. Researchers presume that language barriers pull down scores for Hispanics.

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By Shariita Forrest, in News Bureau Illinois

Champaign, IL – A researcher at the University of Illinois is counting on a unique computer program to make it easier and more enjoyable for elementary school students who are at risk of academic failure to learn basic addition and subtraction facts.

Traditional instruction often relies on rote memorization to teach children basic mathematics – a process that can be monotonous for students, and inefficient, ineffective and frustrating for teachers and students alike, according to Arthur Baroody, a professor emeritus in the department of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education at the U. of I. Baroody has developed Number Sense, a computer program that builds on children’s natural tendency to seek out patterns and relations and enables them to learn reasoning strategies that, with practice, can be applied efficiently, even to new, previously unpracticed addition or subtraction facts.

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Monthly Archive for November, 2010

After the Dust Clears

Latest Learning Journal Papers

Learning Journal: Recently Published

Teachers Talk Back – David Greene

12th-Grade Reading and Math Scores Rise, Surprising Experts

Recently published in the Learning Journal