Franklin Schargel’s Blog

Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC‘s (Centers for Disease Control) National Center for HIV/AIDS, speaking at AIDS 2012, speaking at an international conference of more than 21,000 researchers and organizers in Washington indicated that some of the news about teenagers having sex is positive. In particular, black high school students have dramatically reduced sexual behaviors that can lead to HIV infection over the past 20 years, helping to narrow the gap in risky behaviors between them and white students.

Key changes from 1991 to 2011 include:

“¢The proportion of American high school students who have ever had sex fell from 54% to 47%. Among blacks, the proportion who have ever had sex fell even more sharply, from 82% to 60%.

“¢The proportion of students who had sex within the past three months declined from 38% to 34% overall. Among blacks, that number fell from 59% to 41%.

“¢The proportion of students who had four or more sexual partners decreased from 19% to 15%. Among blacks, that proportion fell from 43% to 25%.

“¢Among sexually active students, the proportion who used a condom the last time they had sex increased from 46% to 60%. Among black students, that rate grew from 48% to 65%.

With “perfect use,” condoms can prevent almost all HIV infections. In the real world, they prevent about 80% of transmissions, studies show.

Significantly, the number of new HIV infections “” which has fallen sharply from the peak in the mid-1990s “” also has plateaued over the past decade, at about 50,000 a year.

Meanwhile, the average age at which teens begin having sex “” 16 “” hasn’t changed in 20 years.

HIV rates are also skyrocketing among specific populations, such as gay black youth. Nearly 6% of gay black men under 30 are newly infected with the AIDS virus each year, according to a study presented Monday, with one in four black gay men infected by age 25.

Research now strongly links HIV infection in the USA with poverty and social issues such as homelessness, incarceration, lack of education, racial discrimination and homophobia.

 

With the turning of the calendar to the month of June, most of us are ready for summer.  I want to wish you and your families a restful, uneventful break from the hectic pace you have put in this year.

I will be here all summer posting the latest events taking place in education.  You can receive regular updates by simply “Subscribing” on the right hand side of this homepage.  I will be posting new events twice a week.

In the meanwhile, enjoy your well-deserved rest.

Franklin

The economy’s problems include high unemployment, mediocre productivity gains and stagnant or slow-growing earnings for most income classes. While the state of the economy is far from ideal, there are some positives signs. America is in the process of continuing to recover from a deep recession.

The nation’s high school graduation rate has risen “” to 78 percent in 2010. the Education Department says in its most recent estimate. It’s the highest figure since 1974. (For a long time, the rate was under 70 percent. After decades of stagnation, the graduation rate started to turn up in 2000, and the growth has been robust for more than a decade.) On average, these additional high school graduates “” not to mention college degree recipients “” will find better jobs and enjoy better health, long-lasting benefits that will be reaped for many decades.

To those of you who regularly read this blog know that a number of people and organizations  have contributed blogs:  I have made comments dealing with classroom management which have been picked up by :https://howiloveandenjoymyteachingjob.blogspot.com/2013/03/tips-from-teachers-on-classroom.html

Teachers say that managing a classroom takes at least 50% of their time.

For those of you who do not regularly receive updates, you can subscribe to this website by registering your email on the homepage on the right hand side where it says “Subscribe”.

The Chicago Board of Education voted to close 50 neighborhood schools.

I have difficulty understanding how closing of 50 schools at one time ““ the largest school closing in American history””will improve learning conditions better for low-income, inner-city students.  At best, it will save pennies in an estimated shortfall of between $665 million and $1 billion. It will destabilize up to 30,000 students and making many of them cross into vicious gang territory to attend rival schools. It will increase student’s travel time on buses, trains for up to two hours of traveling.  It will cause some students to walk longer distances, especially difficult during Chicago’s bitter winters. It would not promote good student attendance or safety. It will increase class size to over 30 students. The African-American community will bare 90 percent of the burden of the budget cuts.

Under the closure plan, 14 “closing” schools will remain open and so-called “welcoming” schools will be closed. For example, Sexton School is closing but nearby Fiske School is not. But Sexton has a bigger building than Fiske, so Fiske will actually be the school that is shuttered and Sexton will be renamed Fiske. In essence, the students at Fiske will have to relocate to Sexton’s building, though the name of the school will be Fiske and the teachers from Fiske will have priority for the jobs. The former students of Sexton will stay in their physical school building but be told that they are now at a new school called Fiske. The schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett did promise that students at closing schools would be transferred to higher performing schools. Both Fiske and Sexton are rated as having “Average” student growth, though both schools are rated “Far Below Average” for student performance.

I am not fighting to keep all schools in Chicago open. Some low-performing schools should be closed!  But closing so many schools at one time doesn’t make sense.  Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s has done some positive things into Chicago like creating a longer school day; this move to close so many schools isn’t one of them.

 

 

Myron Tribus was my mentor and teacher and so when a mutual friend wrote this, I asked Marion for permission to republish this.  I suggest that you look up Myron in Google and while you are at it, visit https://www.marionbrady.com.  

By Valerie Strauss

This was written by Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.

By Marion Brady

If you fly, thank Myron Tribus for helping make your flight safer. He played a major role in the development of the equipment that keeps airliner wings free of ice.

Myron was a captain in the Army Air Force during World War II. Later, he was a gas turbine design engineer for General Electric, dean of Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, senior vice president for research & engineering for Xerox, an author of scientific papers and books, director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-founder of Exergy, Inc.

What brought Myron from California to my house in Florida for three days many years ago was our shared concern about what kids were and weren’t being taught. We both believed that the traditional curriculum hadn’t adapted to the 20^th Century “” much less the 21^{st “”} and that the reforms being promoted by business interests and politicians weren’t just making the situation worse but blocking real reform.

Myron agreed with me that deciding what knowledge is most important, andusing systems theory to simplify the organization of that knowledge, were logical  first steps in real education reform, and that’s what we talked about.

I’ve stopped thinking I’ll live to see those ideas being taken seriously. Today’s reformers take it for granted that what was taught in the past is fine for the future, and their ideas about the organization of knowledge begin and end with the simplistic, knowledge-fragmenting “Common Core State Standards.”  The latest evidence is the just-released report from a committee chaired by Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein titled, “U.S. Education Reform and National Security.”

That said, I can’t bring myself to simply walk away from the educational catastrophe that’s been unfolding since the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and other rightwing groups took control of education policy in the 1980s and pulled the rest of the political spectrum with them. Concern for the educations of my nine great-grandchildren, for their children, and for their children’s children, won’t let me desert the field.

I’ve got a modest proposal. No Child Left Behind, and now Race to the Top, have made standardized tests the sole measure of educational quality. What makes those kinds of tests acceptable is the ridiculous notion that machines can measure brains, but the campaign to discredit teacher judgment of student performance has been so successful there’s no going back. Standardized tests are here to stay. Attacks on them are dismissed as lame efforts by teachers to avoid being held accountable.

Manufactured tests, then, must be accepted, but must be made to do good rather than harm. The practice of testing what’s taught is out the window. Now, what gets tested is what gets taught, so the simplest, most direct way to improve what’s taught is to improve the tests.

Arne Duncan, U.S. secretary of education, says kids need to be taught “higher order” thinking skills. If teachers teach to tests, and standardized test items require the use of higher order thinking skills, those skills will be taught.

I propose that all standardized tests test higher order thinking skills.

What, exactly, are “thinking skills?” Asked, most professional educators will make lists something like the one below. They’ll also generally agree that every skill on the list except the first one””recalling””is a higher order thought process.

Recalling

Classifying

Applying

Inferring

Hypothesizing

Generalizing

Relating

Synthesizing

Valuing

 

Science test question: “You’ve studied some of the ways that plants and animals have evolved to protect themselves from harm. Which of the following five ways is NOT a self-protection strategy?”

To answer, the test taker just has to remember something read or heard. That’s recalling, and it’s not a higher order thinking skill.

Science test question: “You’ve studied some of the ways that plants and animals have evolved to protect themselves from harm. Choose one of those self-protection strategies and explain how it could be adapted to protect convenience store clerks from harm.”

To answer, the test taker has to put an idea that’s been learned to practical use. That’s applying, and it’s a higher order thinking skill.

History test question: We’ve been studying big ideas called “˜shared assumptions’ that help hold human societies together. In the spaces provided, list four of those assumptions.”

To answer, the test taker just has to remember something read or heard. That’s recalling, and it’s not a higher order thinking skill.

History test question: “We’ve been studying big ideas called “˜shared assumptions’ that help hold human societies together. Below is a copy of a page from the 1777 New England Primer that uses two-line verses based on the Bible to teach the letters of the alphabet. Based on the verses, what assumption about basic human nature seems to have been shared by 18^th Century Puritans?”

To answer, the test taker has to draw inferences from the verses. Inferring is a higher order thinking skill.

 

If higher order thinking skills are tested, teachers will teach them. Those who don’t know how will quickly learn.

Of course, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Educational Testing Service, and other test manufacturers aren’t going to volunteer to test student-initiated higher order thinking skills. Neither are the politicians they help elect and re-elect going to make them even try to do so unless they think voters give them no alternative.

So voters should give them no alternative. Unless politicians and test manufacturers can make a convincing case for not teaching the young to think, they should be told what they’ve been telling teachers who say standardized tests are a waste of time and money: “No excuses!”

It’s likely that nothing short of binding agreements between states and test manufacturers will yield the new tests. To that end, in appropriate legal language, contracts should make clear that (a) every test question in every subject will evaluate a particular, named thinking skill, (b) every test will evaluate a balanced mix of all known thinking skills, and (c) a panel of experts not connected to test manufacturers or politicians will preview all test items to assure contract compliance. No excuses.

Fairtest, Parents Across America, United Opt Out National, and other state and local organizations have strategies in place to try to persuade. Petitions and referendums invite signers. Parents, grandparents “” indeed, all who care about kids and country “” should get on board.

No more multimillion dollar checks for tests that no one but manufacturers are allowed to see. No more tests the pass-fail cut scores of which can be raised and lowered to make political points. No more kids labeled and discarded, every one with a brain wired to do all sorts of amazing things. If storing trivia in short-term memory doesn’t happen to be one of those things, that shouldn’t put them out of school and on the street.

Postscript: Myron hasn’t been well for a long time, so we haven’t talked in years. I last saw him at his 80^th birthday party. A documentary film crew from Russia was there. When I asked why, they said that in Russian scientific circles, Myron was a hero.

He’s also one of my heroes””a genuine genius who understood the absolutely critical role that school curricula play in promoting and maintaining societal well-being, and dedicated his pre-illness retirement years to trying to improve it.

Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet.

 

While cheating among students is recognized as part of the educational process, cheating by educators is neither expected nor accepted.  Since the institution of high stakes testing, educators cheating has become an issue. 

In El Paso, Texas, a third school district has acknowledge that there had been cheating in order to meet federal accountability measures.  An outside audit of the San Elizario Independent School District revealed that several students’ credits were manipulated and students were reclassified inappropriately into different grade levels.

A former El Paso School Superintendent, Lorenzo Garcia is in federal prison for devising a similar scheme.

Teachers “˜dropout” at higher rates than students’ dropout.  The teacher dropout rate is 46 percent over five years.  Many believe that the reasons teachers leave is because of students or parents.  

A new study published in the Elementary School Journal finds that the main reason new teachers leave the profession is not the insane workload or the lack of resources but, their principals.

Peter Youngs, an associate professor of education policy at Michigan State University, and Ben Pogodzinski of Wayne State University, surveyed 184 beginning teachers in Michigan and Indiana on the factors that might influence them to leave or stay in the profession. Topping the teachers’ list, the researchers found, was how well a school’s principal works with the staff.

The quality of the relationship with their principal was a stronger predictor of the teachers’ intent to remain in the profession than factors related to workloads, administrative duties, resource availability, or the frequency of professional-development opportunities.

“The focus,” he said, “would be on how principals could increase their knowledge of setting a healthy, productive school climate and understanding ways that their actions and leadership can impact new teachers’ attitudes and outcomes.”