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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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

1. 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!
   
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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?

During the 1990’s America’s business community found comfort in being able to hire foreign workers in many countries – particularly in India and China – to supplement or supplant scientists and mathematicians, and people skilled in technology.

According to a report in USA Today, based on research of Vivek Wadhwa from Duke University, skilled immigrants are returning to their home countries.  Wadhwa projects that in the next five years, 100,000 immigrants will go back to India and an additional 100,000 will return to China.

The report indicates that there are three reasons for the reverse brain drain.  These immigrants in their home country are now seeing career opportunities back home.  The quality of life is better in India and China and cheaper as well.  And, as a result of 9/11 it is increasingly difficult for immigrants to come to the United States.

What are the implications for America’s schools?  American industry has become accustomed to hiring skilled foreign workers.   To a large degree, America’s science and math teachers have not majored nor minored in science or mathematics.  Many individuals trained in math or science went into the more lucrative occupations in industry as well as jobs with better working conditions.  If America’s businesses want people trained in math, science and technology one of the things they will have to do is help create better working conditions for schools as well as insisting that state governments pay K-12 educators more money.

A study from the United States Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center found that in about two-thirds of 37 school shootings in the last 25 years, the attackers felt “bullied, persecuted, threatened, attacked or injured.”  Between 50 and 70 percent of them have been viciously bullied and teased.  “Does this mean if you are bullied and teased you’re going to pick up a gun? No,” said William Pollack, an expert on the psychology of boys.  “But it does mean that those who have gotten thrown over the edge had been bullied and teased? Absolutely!”

The first large-scale national study of bullying by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development survey 15,686 private and public school students in grades 6 through 10.  The study found that 10.6 percent of the children had been bullied “sometime” or “weekly”, 13 percent had bullied others and 6.3 percent had been the bully and the target.

Bullying takes place more frequently in junior high or middle schools more frequently than high schools and most frequently among male students.

What can schools do to stop this growing plague?  If you see bullying take place – stop it.  Encourage students to come forward if they have been bullied.  Have students form a group to stand up for bullied students.  If a student has been bullied, he/she should create a “bully prevention team” to stand together to prevent bullying.