Archives for November 2012

The USA’s largest teachers union is losing members and revenue, potentially threatening its political clout.

The National Education Association (NEA) has lost more than 100,000 members since 2010.  It presently has 2.2 million members. By 2014, union projections show, it could lose a cumulative total of about 308,000 full-time teachers and other workers, a 16% drop from 2010. Lost dues will shrink NEA’s budget an estimated $65 million, or 18%.

In 1988, the typical teacher had 15 years of experience, according to research by the University of Pennsylvania’s Richard Ingersoll. By 2008, it was down to one year. “An increasing number of them are not sticking around,” Ingersoll said. “There’s this constant replenishment of beginners.”

America will regret the loss of teachers.  Losing experienced teachers, the lifeblood of education will hurt the country.  Assume that you needed a vital operation and had a choice of a newly graduated surgeon from a highly regarded medical school or a 15-year experienced doctor who had performed hundreds of these surgeries.  Who would you choose?

According to the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, more than a quarter of American teenagers have sent nude photos of themselves electronically and those who have were almost twice as likely as their peers to have had sex. About half of almost 1,000 students ages 14 to 19 from seven public high schools in Texas said they had been asked to send a naked photo.

Of females who had sent a nude message, more than 77 percent reported having had sex.  For those who had never sent a naked photo, 42 percent said they had had sex.  For males, those numbers were 82 percent compared with 45 percent.  The most prevalent group asking for and sending nude photos were white non-Hispanics and African-American teens.

I do not believe that educators or parents would have predicted so high a number of sexting was taking place.

According to a report from the Center for American Progress analyzed three years of questionnaires from the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, a national test given each year.

Among the findings:

• “¢37% of fourth-graders say their math work is “often” or “always” too easy;
• “¢57% of eighth-graders say their history work is “often” or “always” too easy;
• “¢39% of 12th-graders say they rarely write about what they read in class.
• Only one in five eighth-graders read more than 20 pages a day, either in school or for homework. Most report that they read far less.

While this may not be true for all students, this is a problem for many.  Thanks to high stakes testing students are being taught “what to think” instead of “how to think”.  But the problem isn’t simply a matter of blaming the tests.  The phrase “rigor, relevance and relationships” comes quickly to mind.  Are our students being pressed to a rigorous curriculum or have we watered down our standards?  Do students see the relevance of what they are being taught?  Or are they simply being told, “Learn this because it will be on the test”.  Or, “you may need this later in your life’.  Are we boring our students?  The Gates Foundation report, “The Silent Epidemic” said that the reason students dropout of school is they are being bored.  The curriculum is just void of critical thinking, creative thinking.  As a result, students are probably bored, and when they’re bored, they think the classes are easy.