Monthly Archive for September, 2011

The Great Schools Revolution

Published on September 30, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From The Economist

FROM Toronto to Wroclaw, London to Rome, pupils and teachers have been returning to the classroom after their summer break. But this September schools themselves are caught up in a global battle of ideas. In many countries education is at the forefront of political debate, and reformers desperate to improve their national performance are drawing examples of good practice from all over the world.

Why now? One answer is the sheer amount of data available on performance, not just within countries but between them. In 2000 the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the OECD, a rich-country club, began tracking academic attainment by the age of 15 in 32 countries. Many were shocked by where they came in the rankings. (PISA’s latest figures appear in table 1.) Other outfits, too, have been measuring how good or bad schools are. McKinsey, a consultancy, has monitored which education systems have improved most in recent years.

Technology has also made a difference. After a number of false starts, many people now believe that the internet can make a real difference to educating children. Hence the success of institutions like America’s Kahn Academy (see article). Experimentation is also infectious; the more governments try things, the more others examine, and copy, the results.

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Our Kids’ Glorious New Age of Distraction

Published on September 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Thomas Rogers, Salon.com

Children are not what they used to be. They tweet and blog and text without batting an eyelash. Whenever they need the answer to a question, they simply log onto their phone and look it up on Google. They live in a state of perpetual, endless distraction, and, for many parents and educators, it’s a source of real concern. Will future generations be able to finish a whole book? Will they be able to sit through an entire movie without checking their phones? Are we raising a generation of impatient brats?

According to Cathy N. Davidson, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Duke University, and the author of the new book ”Now You See It: How Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn,” much of the panic about children’s shortened attention spans isn’t just misguided, it’s harmful. Younger generations, she argues, don’t just think about technology more casually, they’re actually wired to respond to it in a different manner than we are, and it’s up to us — and our education system — to catch up to them.

Davidson is personally invested in finding a solution to the problem. As vice provost at Duke, she spearheaded a project to hand out a free iPod to every member of the incoming class, and began using wikis and blogs as part of her teaching. In a move that garnered national media attention, she crowd-sourced the grading in her course. In her book, she explains how everything from video gaming to redesigned schools can enhance our children’s education — and ultimately, our future.

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Photo: iStockphoto/northlightimages

 

School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade

Published on September 22, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

Diane Ravitch, The New York Review of Books

Children on the playground of Fairbanks Elementary School, Springfield, Missouri

It is a well-known fact that American education is in crisis. Black and Hispanic children have lower test scores than white and Asian children. The performance of American students on international tests is mediocre.

Less well known are contrary facts. The black–white achievement gap, as a recent report put it, “is as old as the nation itself.” It was cut in half in the 1970s and 1980s, probably by desegregation, increased economic opportunities for black families, federal investment in early childhood education, and reductions in class size.1

Another little-known fact is that American students have never performed well on international tests. When the first such tests were given in the mid-1960s, our students usually scored at or below the median, and sometimes at the bottom of the pack. This mediocre performance is nothing to boast about, but it is not an indicator of future economic decline. Despite our students’ mediocre test scores, the nation’s economy has been robust for most of the past half-century. And the news is not all terrible. On the latest international test, the Program for International Student Assessment, American schools in which fewer than 10 percent of the students were poor outperformed the schools of Finland, Japan, and Korea. Even when as many as 25 percent of the students were poor, American schools performed as well as the top-scoring nations. As the proportion of poor students rises, the scores of US schools drop.

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Image: Eli Reed / Magnum Photos

Tempest in an Inkpot

Published on September 18, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Graham T. Beck, The Morning News

Don’t be fooled by the hand-lettering trend in movie posters and book covers—cursive is dead. Who cares? A million angry commenters around the web who extol the virtues of loops and curls. But the traditional form has a history that’s less than precious.

Third grade was the year cursive didn’t matter. That’s not to say it definitely matters now, or that it didn’t actually matter then, but that’s what I most vividly remember repeating for the nine months that school was in session: “Cursive doesn’t matter.” It was my name, rank, and serial number. Handwriting was my enemy. Those who championed its cause: my captors. “Cursive doesn’t matter,” I’d tell them. “It can’t matter,” I’d say to myself. It couldn’t.

No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of making my hand shape those precious loops. Despite extra classes, a school-appointed therapist, even mortifying, neon-colored rubber grips that fit like erasers over the shaft of my pencil and forced my fingers into a perfect penmanship claw, everything I put down in cursive was not just inelegant and wobbly but also completely illegible. A symptom of some disease. A signifier of a horrible shortcoming that would show itself days or weeks or years later. Eventually, someday, I’d kill, I’d steal, I’d use swear words like my brother’s friend Walter. My future failure was written in my writing. And so if cursive did matter, well, I was in for a life of trouble, so cursive couldn’t matter.

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Image Credit: Katie Turner

In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores

Published on September 13, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Matt Richtel, The New York Times

CHANDLER, Ariz. — Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” — but not in any traditional way.

In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.

The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.

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Photo by Jim Wilson / The New York Times

Discursivity, International Students and Representation

Published on September 13, 2011 in Book, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

 

Discursivity, International Students and Representation: Walking through Different Worlds  by Margaret Kumar  is now available as part of The Learner series.

Discursivity, international students and representation: Walking through different worlds is a text that will help academics, support services staff and administrative personnel who are involved in the teaching and learning practices of international students. The question it answers is: what constitutes an international student? In relation to this it looks at strategies for internationalising the curriculum at a micro level. It also offers a new approach towards understanding the multiple subject positions of international students whilst at the same time providing an analysis of the ways in which students are identified through various forms of labelling.

Margaret Kumar PhD. currently works as the Higher Degrees by Research, Language and Learning Advisor at Deakin University. Previously she worked as an Academic and Language Skills Advisor for undergraduate, coursework postgraduate and higher degree by research international students at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University. Through her work, Margaret has presented challenging perspectives on how teaching and learning practices for international students could be mediated. She has presented dialogic models on how international students from postcolonial backgrounds are represented.

Why are Finland’s Schools Successful?

Published on September 8, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By LynNell Hancock, Smithsonian.com

It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.

Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring.

“I took Besart on that year as my private student,” Louhivuori told me in his office, which boasted a Beatles “Yellow Submarine” poster on the wall and an electric guitar in the closet. When Besart was not studying science, geography and math, he was parked next to Louhivuori’s desk at the front of his class of 9- and 10-year- olds, cracking open books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, the son of Kosovo war refugees had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.

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Photo by Stuart Conway

The War on Teachers and the Impact on U.S. Public Opinion

Published on September 4, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Steve Singiser, Daily Kos,

For more than four decades and counting, the professional organization for educators, Phi Delta Kappa, has conducted an extensive annual survey of public attitudes towards education.

Given that my “day job” is as a secondary school teacher, I always check out the PDK poll (conducted by Gallup this past June) with a great deal of interest. This year, however, that level of interest was even further piqued, given the war on teachers being waged in GOP-controlled states across the country, and (to a lesser extent) in the traditional media.

Would the relentless teacher-bashing being offered up by Republican politicos, and their enablers in the media, actually move public opinion? As I wrote in March:

The question now becomes whether the GOP assault on teachers unions will be accepted by a voting public convinced of a crisis and willing to take dramatic measures in the name of a solution (whether the policies in question offer a solution is a topic for another day). In contrast, it may well be condemned as a drastic overreach for which the Republicans will pay a dear price politically down the line.

And, as the students begin to head back to school across the country, along comes the PDK/Gallup survey to offer us some clues to answering that question.

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