Blog

School friends may play a major role in teen’s academic success.

In a new study conducted in Los Angeles 629 12th-graders kept a record of
activities such as time spent studying and time spent with school friends and out-of-school friends. Students with higher grade-point averages (GPAs) had more school friends than out-of-school friends. The more school friends, the higher the
GPA.

It appeared that in-school friends are more likely to be achievement-oriented and share and support school-related activities, including studying, because they are all in the same
environment.

The study was recently published online in the Journal of Research on Adolescence.

The findings don’t mean that friends from outside of school aren’t beneficial.  It simply means that the friendships formed in school are more beneficial for academic success.

Data clearly indicate that students who spend more time in school are more academically successful.  It may indicate that schools should encourage more time in school through the use of clubs and sports activities.

Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The purpose of this list was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. The Mindset List website at www.beloit.edu/mindset.

The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since “digital” has always been in the cultural DNA, they’ve never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat.

Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them.  A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older.

---

A Portion of Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014

Most students entering college for the first time this fall””the Class of 2014″”were born in 1992.

Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.

“Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.

With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities.

A quarter of the class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority”¦unless it involves “real” aliens from another planet.

Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause.

Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.

Leno and Letterman have always been trading insults on opposing networks.

They have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.

Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.

Czechoslovakia has never existed.

Second-hand smoke has always been an official carcinogen.

Adhesive strips have always been available in varying skin tones.

American companies have always done business in Vietnam.

Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.

They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.

Galileo is forgiven and welcome back into the Roman Catholic Church.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has always sat on the Supreme Court.

They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.

The Post Office has always been going broke.

The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing.

One way or another, “It’s the economy, stupid” and always has been.

Silicone-gel breast implants have always been regulated.

The rest of the list is available at www.beloit.edu/mindset

Welcome back! Hopefully you have had a chance to relax, do some reading, swimming and just mellowing out.

As the new school year begins, I’d like you to take a look at the past year and what you have accomplished.  I have had the privilege of talking to educators at conferences during the summer and have been impressed with their stories.  I have spoken to teachers, educational assistants, secretaries, counselors, administrators, school security officers – people who work passionately at schools day after day. These are the folks who teach children, engage them in learning and keep them safe.  They do the real work and are rarely thanked for doing jobs that come with so many challenges.

During the past school year, I have visited classrooms and I’m impressed with what I have seen.  Children are learning in classrooms.  Most students left school at the end of the year better readers than they were at the beginning.  Their math knowledge and their awareness of the world have improved.

So before you walk into the school, take a bow.  You deserve it.

Hope you have a productive and successful year.  I will be talking to you.

Franklin

Welcome back.  For many of you it seems that the summer went too quickly.  I understand that having been in the classroom.  Hopefully,  you had a chance to rest and recharge your batteries.

While you were gone, lots of things have happened in the field of education.  One of the most productive is that the Congress passed and  President Obama signed legislation which would stop 300,000 educators from being laid off.

As for me, my latest book, 162 Keys to School Success, was published.  One book dealing with high performing classrooms is at the publisher and I am working on two new books which, hopefully will be published at the end of this year or early 2011.  You will find excerpts from 162 Keys at the Resources Section of my copyright-free website.

Again, my best wishes for a smooth and productive school year.

f

The Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups report examines educational progress and challenges in the United States by race and ethnicity. This report shows that over time, the numbers in each race/ethnicity who have completed high school and continued their education in college have increased. Despite these gains, the rate of progress has varied. Differences on key indicators of educational background, performance, and attainment persist among the various races and ethnicities studied.

·        In 2008, a higher percentage of children who identified as Asian (51 percent) had a mother with at least a bachelor’s degree than did children who identified as White (36 percent), as two or more races (31 percent), as Black (17 percent), as American Indian/Alaska Native (16 percent), and as Hispanic (11 percent).
·        Forty-eight percent of public school 4th-graders were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches in 2009, including 77 percent of Hispanics, 74 percent of Blacks, 68 percent of American Indian/Alaska Natives, 34 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 29 percent of White 4th-graders.
·        From 1999 to 2008, the total number of Black and Hispanic students taking an Advanced Placement (AP) exam more than tripled, from 94,000 to 318,000 students. In 2008, Asians had the highest mean AP exam score (3.08) across all exams, while Blacks had the lowest (1.91).
·        Among 8th-graders in 2009, 63 percent of Asians/Pacific Islanders had no absences in the past month, compared to 35 percent of American Indians/Alaska Natives.
·        In 2008, 44 percent of White 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in colleges and universities (a 16 percentage point increase from 1980); approximately 32 percent of Black 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in colleges or universities (an increase of 12 percentage points from 1980); and 26 percent of Hispanic 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled (an increase of 10 percentage points from 1980).

The report additionally notes that more than 11 million elementary and secondary school students speak a language other than English at home.

To view the full report please visit https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2010015

President Obama has requested an additional $989 million in funding for
Head Start in the next fiscal year, which would ratchet up Head Start’s budget to about $8.2 billion. (Head Start also got an extra $2.1 billion as part of
last year’s economic stimulus.)

The latest indication: a study of 5,000 students earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which found virtually no difference in academic achievement by the end of first grade between those
who attended Head Start and those who were eligible to attend but didn’t. The HHS study followed the students from 2002 through 2006, showed that before entering kindergarten, the children in the Head Start group did score higher academically in some areas than the non-Head Start group. But that gap virtually disappeared in less than two years.

Yasmina Vinci, Executive Director of the National Head Start Association offers a counter argument.

“Right now, because of tight budgets, Head Start serves only 41% of at-risk
preschool students, and Head Start for infants and toddlers serves a minuscule 3.5%.

People who experience the outcomes have affirmed Head Start’s value. Just ask police chiefs who know that people who began in Head Start commit
fewer crimes and go to jail less often. Just ask school administrators. For example, Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland recently found
that kindergarteners with special needs who had been in Head Start needed 3.7 hours of special education per week on average, versus 9.8 hours for non-Head Start children “” a huge financial saving.”

The problems seem to be more with Head Start than with the concept of early education generally. Low-income children often begin school academically
behind their more affluent peers, and early education offers these children a chance to start at less of a disadvantage.

What can states do instead?  One option is state-funded preschool programs. Three states “” Oklahoma, Georgia and Florida “” have universal preschool for 4-year-olds, while 35 other states help fund preschool programs. A 2009 Georgetown University study of free-lunch eligible students in Tulsa-area Head Start and Oklahoma Pre-K programs found that students in the state program showed more progress, in both cognitive development and social-emotional skills, than their Head Start peers.

There are new results of an ongoing study from the Alliance for Excellent Education that demonstrate the economic benefits of reducing the dropout rates for students of color in the nation’s forty-five largest metropolitan areas.
Earlier this year, the Alliance broke new ground by releasing metropolitan area-level data underscoring the powerful connection between decreasing the dropout rate and strengthening local economies.  They released a new report that looks at the economic benefits that would come from improving the dropout rate of students of color in particular, who we know are among the most at risk of not graduating from high school.  The findings estimate the contributions that additional high school graduates would likely make to a number of key economic factors, including job and economic growth, annual earnings, and home and automobile sales. They demonstrate the significant stake that community members””even those without children in the school system””have in the effectiveness of their local high schools. These findings also bring to light the return on investment that local areas would likely see if community members were to address the dropout crisis that exists among students of color in their local high schools, underscoring the notion that the best economic stimulus package is, indeed, a high school diploma.

Information about these reports areavailable at https://www.all4ed.org/files. or by visiting the Alliance’s website.

Check to see if your community is listed and then show the findings to your federal and state representatives and to members of your business community.  Maybe this will stimulate a discussion on the implementation of cutting funding for education.

An article appeared in the New York Times, (6/11/2010) identifying a growing problem.  The growing pressure of  schools to succeed with student’s testing has led to cheating among teachers and school administrators. In a number of schools, this has been caused by teachers receiving extra pay for increased school test scores.  Some inflated scores have been reported by principals and superintendents in order for them to hold on to their positions.

In the  Galena Park Independent School District, outside of Houston, Texas,  the principal, assistant principal and three teachers resigned May 24 in a scandal over test tampering.  The district said the educators had distributed a detailed study guide after stealing a look at the state science test. The district invalidated students’ scores.

Investigations in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and elsewhere this year have pointed to cheating by educators. Experts say the phenomenon is increasing as the stakes over standardized testing ratchet higher “” including, most recently, taking student progress on tests into consideration in teachers’ performance reviews.

Colorado passed a sweeping law last month making teachers’ tenure dependent on test results, and nearly a dozen other states have introduced plans to evaluate teachers partly on scores. Many school districts already link teachers’ bonuses to student improvement on state assessments. Houston decided this year to use the data to identify experienced teachers for dismissal, and New York City will use it to make tenure decisions on novice teachers.

The federal No Child Left Behind law is a further source of pressure. Like a high jump bar set intentionally low in the beginning, the law “” which mandates that public schools bring all students up to grade level in reading and math by 2014 “” was easy to satisfy early on. But the bar is notched higher annually, and the penalties for schools that fail to get over it also rise: teachers and administrators can lose jobs and see their school taken over.

While there isn’t any national data is collected on educator cheating. Experts who consult with school systems estimated that 1 percent to 3 percent of teachers “” thousands annually “” cross the line between accepted ways of boosting scores, like using old tests to prep students, and actual cheating.

I am not going to excuse teacher or administrator cheating on test results.  Obviously as educators, we do not excuse it when it is done by students.  But  high stakes testing is not the only way, and in my opinion, the best way of measuring student performance.  When you add in performance pay, promotions, tenure and rehiring and AYP to the list, there is enormous pressure.