Franklin Schargel’s Blog

The 5 Most Marketable College Degrees of 2009

There are so many marvelous websites out there that when I discover a new one I like to share it with my readers. This one is called Connecting Learning to Life and it is from the West Fargo High School Career Center Blog

Where should educators direct students in light of the current recession/depression? Unemployment rates are at a 14-year high and predictions are that it will last at least to 2010.

Nursing
Nursing is one of the best educational investments out there. It requires only an associate degree to break into the field, though a bachelor’s is usually preferred.

On top of an impressive average starting salary — over $52,000, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers — benefits include company-sponsored health care and matched retirement and sometimes additional perks such as tuition reimbursement and student-loan forgiveness.

With the addition of approximately 470,000 jobs between now and 2016, registered nurses will find work in organizations ranging from hospitals and clinics to retirement homes and summer camps. Minimal tuition investment, maximum opportunities.

Computer/information science
While almost everyone else took pay cuts last year, computer science grads saw their average starting salary rise nearly 15 percent between 2007 and 2008.

With starting annual salaries hovering around the $60,000 mark, computer science grads claimed the No. 1 fastest-growing occupation in the country ““

Engineering
Those entering the engineering market are still finding decent jobs and decent pay, especially in the areas of computer and project engineering.

NACE reports that while those majoring in liberal arts fields can expect starting salaries of $30,000 to $35,000 per year, new engineers earn an average salary topping $56,000 per year, not including health care, signing bonuses and company-sponsored retirement plans.

Economics
Students who know their way around both bull and bear markets (and have the degree to prove it) have a much better shot of landing a well-paying job than most other grads.

In addition to a nearly $53,000 average starting salary, economics majors can also expect more job options. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, two of the top 20 fastest-growing occupations require economics or business-related degrees to break in.

The BLS estimates that the market for personal financial advisors will grow over 40 percent within the next decade while the market for financial analysts should grow over 30 percent.

Education
As the baby boomers exit the teaching market, the field will require new blood to move in. The National Educational Association estimates that in the next decade, more than 2 million new teachers will be needed to replace retirees and tend to increasing student populations.

The field is especially ripe for bilingual, special education, math and science educators. While teachers’ starting salaries have traditionally been lower than those in professions that require comparable education, teachers willing to work in critical-needs areas may be eligible for substantial signing bonuses as well as student loan forgiveness programs.

Self Esteem

Many are aware that at-risk learners have low self-esteem. A new book, NutureShock (by Bo Bronson & Asley Merryman, Twelve) has the latest research on self-esteem. The books says that high self-esteem doesn’t improve grades, reduce anti-social behavior, deter alcohol drinking or do anything good for children. In fact according to the book, telling kids how smart they are may be counter productive.

According to Mr. Bronson & Ms. Merryman, dropout programs and anti-drug programs do not work. The D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) Program developed in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department, D.A.R.E. materials are being used in 80% of American school districts. The program has no long-term and only mild short-term effects according to the book.

Using Cell Phones to Cheat on Tests

A poll conducted by Common Sense Media found that 17 percent of students said they had taken pictures of quizzes and test questions. Nearly half said they had used cell phones to warn others about quizzes. 25 percent admitted to texting answer to tests to friends. About 57% said they knew classmates who did. The poll said that one in four texts were sent by students during the week during class time.

Obviously something needs to be done since 83 percent of teens have cell phones and nearly two-thirds use them at school. Parents want children to have cell phones for safety reasons. Many of these students work after school so there is that reason for them to have the phones. So, banning them is not the solution either.

Cheating has always been around; it simply has become more sophisticated and while there may be good reasons for students to have them in school, the implications of students who become doctors, lawyers or achieve high SAT/ACT scores because of their ability to cheat frightens me.

The entire community needs to come together to come up with workable strategies. We need to manage the change that technology brings. This means that schools need to bring the community – parents, businesspeople and educators to develop some way of working this out.

The Answer to All America’s Educational Troubles

I have just returned from a meeting where people from all levels of the educational community met with officials from the U.S. Department of Education. There were members of the school board, parents, K-12 educators, community college personnel and people representing a variety of colleges.

When the representatives of the US Department of Education asked, “What can the federal government do to improve graduation rates” a large number of people – too many people said, “give us more money”?

If more money were the solution to raising educational achievement, then the Washington DC school system would not have any problems. It spends $13,446 per student (2006 figures),the third highest per pupil expenditure in the nation.

I am not saying that schools cannot use extra money for smaller class sizes, higher teacher salaries, etc. But if the educational community believes that the answer to increased academic achievement is to merely to increase inputs then they are not aware of the health crisis, the wars we are currently fighting, the recession, the unemployment rate, etc. Before the politicians, policy makers and the public will reply with more funding, schools need to start producing better outputs. The nation is losing 30% of its K-12 students (a greater amount of its minorities) and the post-secondary schools are graduating 20-25% of the best that the k-12 system produces. Something is wrong with this picture. I would not flying in a plane where the plane crashed 30% of the time it took off. I do not believe that you, the reader would either. The students who dropout of colleges and universities are not only the best that America produces, but foreign students as well. If the argument of the universities is that the K-12 system is not equipping these students with the skills they need to thrive in the university, then do not accept them.

Those are my thoughts. I would like to hear yours. I will post the best comments.

There is good news and not so good news.

A study from the Center on Education Policy analyzes the achievement gap between low-income students and their peers, and between minority and white students, using test data from all 50 states collected from 2002 through 2008. The report indicates thatAchievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students on state tests have narrowed in many instances over the past decade””continuing a trend that appears to have been bolstered in the 1990s by the standards-based-reform movement, concludes a wide-ranging analysis released today.

Viewing those gaps through a variety of lenses, the report finds that, on the whole, the disparities appear to be narrowing because of the accelerated achievement of lower-performing groups, not slower progress by high-achieving groups.

Nevertheless, achievement gaps continue to remain as large as 20 percentage points or more in some states, the report indicates.

The report does not provide any insight into whether the federal No Child Left Behind Act accelerated””or hindered””progress in closing the gaps. Much of the historical narrowing of achievement gaps predates the nearly 8-year-old law, and the study design does not account for the multitude of factors, such as changes to instruction or accountability policies, that may have influenced student progress during that time.

Across all the subgroups, grade levels, and subjects studied, 74 percent of the trend lines show the gaps in the percentage of students scoring at the “proficient” level narrowing, while 23 percent show them widening.

For the trend lines that show black-white score gaps narrowing, the percentage of students who were proficient grew at a faster rate for the African-American subgroup than for the white subgroup in 142 of the 153 cases.

Overall, the gaps narrowed more often for the black and Latino subgroups than for the Native American or low-income ones.

It should be interesting to see how the media picks on the good news coming out of schools. All too frequently they are in the “attack mode” whenever information about schools is released.

The actual statewide results can be accessed at

https://www.cep-dc.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageId=572

A New Webinar

From At-Risk to Academic Excellence: What Successful Leaders Do
Energizing Strategies for the 21st Century
A new webinar presented by Franklin Schargel, Educator, Author, Motivational Speaker, Trainer, Consultant
Become a turnaround specialist. Franklin combines his experience as a 33-year veteran teacher, counselor, and administrator with the wisdom of 200 school leaders of “high minority, high poverty, high achieving” schools to present proven strategies that will help you become a more successful leader and turn around your school or district. Hear real life stories that illustrate how leaders at successful schools raised academic achievement, motivated students, boosted parent and community involvement and applied the 3 r’s ““ rigor, relevance and relationships.
Click here to listen. https://www.pearsonschool.com/index.cfm?locator=PSZhBk

Are You Ready for a Longer Day and School Year?

The New York Times reported that President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan say that American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe.

”Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

”Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,” Duncan told the AP. ”I want to just level the playing field.”

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it’s not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).

Charter schools are known for having longer school days or weeks or years. For example, kids in the KIPP network of 82 charter schools across the country go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., more than three hours longer than the typical day. They go to school every other Saturday and for three weeks in the summer. KIPP eighth-grade classes exceed their school district averages on state tests.

In Massachusetts’ expanded learning time initiative, early results indicate that kids in some schools do better on state tests than do kids at regular public schools. The extra time, which schools can add as hours or days, is for three things: core academics — kids struggling in English, for example, get an extra English class; more time for teachers; and enrichment time for kids.

Regular public schools are adding time, too, though it is optional and not usually part of the regular school day. Their calendar is pretty much set in stone. Most states set the minimum number of school days at 180 days, though a few require 175 to 179 days.

Disadvantaged kids, on the whole, make no progress in the summer, Alexander said. Some studies suggest they actually fall back. Wealthier kids have parents who read to them, have strong language skills and go to great lengths to give them learning opportunities such as computers, summer camp, vacations, music lessons, or playing on sports teams.

Extra time is not cheap. The Massachusetts program costs an extra $1,300 per student, or 12 percent to 15 percent more than regular per-student spending, said Jennifer Davis, a founder of the program.

Things About Technology You Can Use

A significant number of people have accessed my posting of “25 Things Which Will Be Extinct in 25 Years”. They have asked where I have obtained it. (I do not know from who I received it,) I am indebted to Ian Jukes (www.committedsardine.com) for the following posting which I thought you might be able to use.

The Web is now huge: according DomainTools, there are currently over 103.6 million active domains (and over 348 million dead ones) on the World Wide Web. Last week, Google announced that it has indexed 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) web pages.We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
According to sales figures for Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, the latest in the series by the author of The DaVinci Code, the Amazon e-book version of the 528-page tome is outselling the hardcover edition since it was released to the public Tuesday. And that’s not peanuts ““ the book has already broken Barnes & Noble’s one-day adult-fiction sales record.The Kindle version’s $9.99 price versus the hardcover’s $16.17. As of 10.38 PM EDT time last night, the Kindle version of Dan Brown’s (The Da Vince Code) new book The Lost Symbol was outselling Amazon hard covers of the same book.
Facebook’s user base is nearly as large as the U.S. population and, for the first time, the site has turned a profit. Facebook now has 300 million users – almost as many as the population of the United States. There are about 307 million people living in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. “We’re just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone,” Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s blog.
Think YouTube is a fad? YouTube is estimated to hold in storage at least 140,000,000 videos – with 100,000,000 viewings of those videos every single day. To put those numbers into perspective, that’s 70,000 videos being viewed every minute of every day.But it gets even more amazing – right now it’s estimated that 13 HOURS of video are uploaded to YouTube EVERY MINUTE – that translates into 6.8 million hours of video uploaded every year – or 780 years of viewing content uploaded per year. Food for thought. Do you think this has any implications for education?We need to pay careful attention to YouTube – it’s the canary in the coal mine indicating the major trend that video is rapidly replacing email, texting, and blogging for the younger generation. For them, email is so 20th century and really for old people like you and me.
According to research by Harvard Business School’s Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, people spend 70% of their time on social networks looking at profiles and photos. The Truth About How People Use Twitter “-Women account for 55% of all accounts (in contrast to other social networks, which are male-dominated) – Tweets from men are more widely read. Men and women tweet at about the same rate, which is to say hardly at all. Just 10% of users account for 90% of all tweets, 75% of users hardly ever tweet at all. The median number of tweets is one.

Educators need to know how to use this information about technology. the children that we teach live in an electronic age. To deny its existence by asking them not to text or not to bring cell phones into the classroom to my mind is not realistic. How do we harness the power of technology to enrich learning?