Archives for 2010

At a time when nearly one in 10 American workers is unemployed, college professors are guaranteed jobs for life, teach only a few hours a week, take entire years off, dump grading duties onto graduate students, drop their workweek to a dozen hours or so, all while making $100,000 or more a year. The cost of a college education has risen, in real dollars, by 250 to 300 percent over the past three decades, far above the rate of inflation. Elite private colleges can frequently cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. It is also foolish that graduate programs are pumping new Ph.D.’s into a world without decent jobs for them. Meanwhile, university presidents can make upward of $1 million annually.

Two new books recently were published which will merely intensive the discussion,  ­Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids “” And What We Can Do About It (Times Books, $26), by Andrew Hacker, a professor emeritus of political science at Queens College, and Claudia C. Dreifus, a journalist (and contributor to the science section of The New York Times  and Mark C. Taylor’s Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, $24).

The books point out that tenured and tenure-track professors earn most of the money and benefits, but they’re a minority at the top of a pyramid. Nearly two-thirds of all college teachers are non-tenure-track adjuncts who frequently earn $1,500 to teach a single course. At Williams College, a small liberal arts college, 70 percent of employees do something other than teach.

All of this comes at a time when Columbia University reports that its endowment had dropped by “at least” 30 percent.

Simply brushing off calls for reform may no longer be an option. In this time of educational reform, now is the time to address these issues.

Officials from the Detroit School announced they would close 44 schools.  Detroit’s announcement follows others around the country. Kansas City, Missouri, schools decided to shutter failing schools and a Rhode Island school decided to fire all of its teachers in an attempt to make the school better.

To me, it is an overly simplistic answer to a very complex problem.  Is the problem solely the teachers’ fault?  Do the community, parents and school administrators share the blame?  We need to admit that the educational system is broken.  The people who regularly read this blog know that.  The present educational system is based on a concept designed, with few changes, during the industrial age.  In our middle and high schools, we pass children along an assembly line based model that should have been examined and improved a while ago.  The system still works for a decreasing number of students but it needs to be revised, modernized and strengthened to meet the needs of the students and the society as well.

For some, the easy answer to any problem is to fire the worker.  Were the workers at General Motors and Chrysler responsible for the failure of their companies or was it the people who ran the company?  Did Goldman-Sachs, Enron or the banking system failure the fault of the workers or the failure of the bosses?

Rhode Island has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.  Central Falls is one of the poorest towns in the state.  According to Wikipedia, the median income in the town is $22k. More than 96 percent of the Central Falls High School students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, according to the school’s Web site, and only 6 percent of the people in the town have a college degree. The parents and residents of Central Falls are struggling financially and lack postsecondary education to help them seek higher paying jobs.

Does anyone really believe that by firing teachers the lives of the children will improve and that the newly employed teachers will improve test scores and learning?

Teachers are not magicians. They are unable to pull higher test scores and the lower the dropout rate by pulling answers from a hat. They need help from the parents, help from the community, help from the administrators, help from state and federal governments.

According to Education.com, Rhode Island in 2007/2008 spent more money on inmates ($38,503) than on starting teachers ($33,815).  But the answer isn’t simply throwing more money on a failing system.  Teachers are aware when they enter the field how much they will be paid.  They enter the field because they want to help children learn.  Data indicate that they do not leave the field mainly because of low pay.

Or take a look at the Chicago Public Schools, where former CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. secretary of education, closed many schools. There’s been little change in scores because students are being transferred to other low-performing schools. It hasn’t worked because the community’s attitude and level of support hasn’t changed.

While some research suggests that the incidence of childhood obesity may be leveling off, a new study finds that for certain racial groups the rates may actually be getting higher.

A new report to be published in the September issue of Pediatrics, finds that black, Hispanic and American Indian girls have two to three times higher odds of having a high body-mass index (BMI) compared to white girls.

What’s more, although rates of obesity peaked for Hispanic girls in 2005, they have kept on rising for American Indian and black girls.

The researchers reviewed data on more than 8 million fifth-, seventh- and ninth-grade students in California. They found that 38% of the kids were overweight, nearly 20% were obese and 3.6% were severely obese.

The racial disparity was most evident in the highest BMI category. Just 1.3% of white girls fell into this category, but 4.9% of American Indian girls and 4.6% of black girls did, reported the study.

White boys peaked in 2005 and declined to 2001 levels by the end of the study. The rate of obesity dropped in Hispanic and Asian boys after 2005, but hadn’t dropped back to 2001 levels by 2008. There was no increase in the prevalence of obesity in black boys, except in the severely obese category, which peaked in 2007. The rates in American Indian boys peaked in 2007, but declined only in the above 95th percentile group.

In some areas, it’s difficult to regularly find affordable fresh produce, and in some areas, it’s not safe for kids to exercise outside. Sleep can play a role in a child’s weight, Landis said. Young children should get 10 to 11 hours of sleep; school-aged kids need 10 hours; and teens need at least nine hours, she said. Without enough sleep, it may be hard to be active or to make good food choices.

What are the implications for schools?  Obesity causes children to become sluggish- unwilling to participate in school activities and worse, more susceptible to diseases like diabetes.  It is imperative for school lunches to be healthy and for school activities to involve all students.

In much of the country, test scores have come down and fewer schools are meeting AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress),  This may not be caused by poorer performance but may be because the bars for passing are being constantly raised as a result of the demands of No Child Left Behind.  What is more upseting is that the gap in student performance between minority and white children seems to be widening.  In New York City, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have control over the city’s schools, the achievement gap which the mayor said that the gap was shrinking, has widened again.

The mayor and chancellor testified before Congress about the city’s impressive progress in closing the gulf in performance between minority and white children. The gains were historic, all but unheard of in recent decades.  “Over the past six years, we’ve done everything possible to narrow the achievement gap “” and we have,” Mr. Bloomberg testified. “In some cases, we’ve reduced it by half.”

When results from the 2010 tests, which state officials said presented a more accurate portrayal of students’ abilities, were released, they came as a blow to the legacy of the mayor and the chancellor, as passing rates dropped by more than 25 percentage points on most tests. But the most painful part might well have been the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap.

Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 82 percent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent among whites and Asians.

But the latest state math and English tests show that the proficiency gap between minority and white students has returned to about the same level as when the mayor arrived. In 2002, 31 percent of black students were considered proficient in math, for example, while 65 percent of white students met that standard.

The bulk of Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein’s effort to overhaul the education system has been focused on the lowest-performing students. The city has closed 91 poorly performing schools, established about 100 charter schools and sent waves of new young teachers and principals into schools in poor neighborhoods.

The city has even tried to attack the deeper issue of how children are reared at home, by offering some families monetary incentives to go to the dentist for checkups, for example, or to maintain good school attendance. The three-year-old pilot project was ended in March after it showed only modest results.

What has caused the drop in test scores as well as a widening of the educational achievement gaps between whites and minorities? Could it have been caused by poor economic conditions for poor families or an increase in fatherless black households?  No body knows.  But the real question to my mind is does political control over schools mean school improvement?  Is it the magic answer to narrowing the achievement gap?  I will let you decide!

Anyone who reads this blog knows my fondness for the work of Diane Ravitch.  IN her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Ms. Ravitch, lays out a plan to improve America’s schools.  Let me present several to you:

• leave decisions about schools to educators, not politicians or busieness people.
• devise a truly national curriculum that sets out what children in every grade should be learning
• expect charter schools to educate the children who need help the most, and not to compete with public schools
• pay teachers a fair wage for their work, not “merit pay” based on deply flawed and unreliable test scores.
• encourage family involvement in education from an early age.

I believe that the ideas listed above provide a basis for discussion.  What do you think about them?

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Program Quality Matters for Adolescent Outcomes

A new Child Trends research brief finds positive outcomes for adolescents in high-quality out-of-school time programs, but no significant differences between adolescents in low-quality programs and those not in a program at all. The brief, How Out-of-School Time Program Quality is Related to Adolescent Outcomes, is based on data from the Every Child Every Promise survey commissioned by the America’s Promise Alliance.  For adolescents ages 12-17, it also finds:

11.5 percent are not in a program, 11.4 percent are in a low-quality program, 45.4 percent are in a medium-quality program, and 31.7 percent are in a high-quality program.
Adolescents in low-quality programs have similar outcomes to adolescents in no program.
Adolescents in medium-quality programs have better school performance than those not in a program, but do not have significantly fewer risky behaviors or significantly greater social competence.
Adolescents in high-quality programs are more likely to avoid risky behaviors, to have better performance in school, and to have greater social competence, than those in no program, even taking account of confounding factors.

High-quality out-of-school time programs are defined as those that promote a sense of physical and emotional safety, enable youth to build positive relationships, allow youth a role in decisions, and support development of social skills, like conflict resolution, leadership, and teamwork.