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Children who are home schooled are white, wealthy and their parents are well educated. Their numbers have dramatically increased, nearly doubling from 850,000 in 1999 to 1,508,000 in 2007 according to the the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics. Home schooled females now outnumber the number of home schooled males by a wide margin (58%-female, 42%-male.)

Sixty percent of home schooled families earn more than $50,000.

The most important reason for home schooling according to the Department of Education was to provide “religious or moral education” (36%). Twenty-one percent of the parents cited concerns about school environment and culture. Only seventeen percent cited dissatisfaction with academic instruction.

It is possible that the decrease of female attendance at traditional schools is the increase of school bullying. But the report did not go into that.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is following in the footsteps of the Bush Administration by supporting efforts to increase the number of charter schools in the nation.

Charter schools are financed with taxpayer money but operate free of many curricular requirements and other regulations that apply to traditional public schools. They serve as alternatives to traditional schools and many serve as incubators for educational innovation. They were founded in Minnesota in 1991. 4,600 have opened; they now educate some 1.4 million of the nation’s 50 million public school students, according to U.S. Department of Education figures.

The Obama administration has been working to persuade state legislatures to lift caps on the number of charter schools.

However a report released by Stanford University researchers found that although some charter schools were doing an excellent job, many students in charter schools were not faring as well as students in traditional public schools. The Stanford report “” which singles out Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas as states that have done little to hold poorly run charter schools accountable.

The Stanford study, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, used student achievement data from 15 states and the District of Columbia to gauge whether students who attended charter schools had fared better than they would if they had attended a traditional public school.

“The study reveals that a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students,” the report says. “Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local public school options, and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.”

Charter schools are criticized because in many states they draw away taxpayer money from traditional public schools, and because many operate with nonunion teachers.

Secretary Duncan has been working to build a national effort to restructure 5,000 chronically failing public schools, which turn out middle school students who cannot read and most of the nation’s high school dropouts.

Charter schools do have a single model. As such, it is difficult to expect that all will do well. But it is necessary to have alternative schools outperform the schools they were designed to replace. If not it is silly to have them. States need to monitor them more effectively and close those that fail to perform.

In a New York Times book review by Jennifer Senior of the book, Columbine by Dave Cullen we learn that the media had a major role in “inventing” things we have come to believe about the incident at Columbine High School in Colorado.

For those of you who do not recall, on April 20,1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered one teacher and 12 students and wounded two dozen others. They then turned the guns on themselves and committed suicide.

Our memories of the story were formed by what the media reported. They told us that the killers killed at random, they were members of the “Trench Coat Mafia”, they were goths, that they sought out blacks, etc.

The author of the book, Cullen is a journalist who covered the story for Salon and Slate and spent ten years doing interviews and reading the diaries of the killers.

The Columbine killings were a failure. The intent of Harris and Klebold were to destroy the entire building and planted bombs to do so, which failed to go off.

Many of the media reports were based on the students, in the school who watched classroom televisions while still trapped inside the building. They reported what they thought was happening and the television reporters reported it as fact. Four students reported that the gunmen were deliberately targeting their victims.

According to the reports the killers were taking aim at “anyone of color, wearing a white hat or playing a sport”. That was not true. In one report, a female student was asked by one of the killers if she believed in God. She supposedly said “yes” and was shot and killed. Her mother wrote a best-selling book titled, “She Said Yes”. The incident never took place.

I am in the process of reading this superb book and suggest that you do the same.

Unfortunately, I have had to deal with school violence in my educational career. I suggest that School Safety Plans include who will talk to the media, and how the information will be reported.

It is imperative that the media not be allowed to make up information about schools. I suggest that schools also assign or have a volunteer who is assigned to write press releases and maintain some contact with the local media.

Some one recently sent me an email about narrowing the achievement gap. Below is his question and my response.
“I don’t think that “narrowing the achievement gap” is necessary nor natural. What we need is MORE students exceeding expectations. Only motivated and rewarded teachers will be able to do that.
When more students begin achieving at levels that are above and beyond expectations, education will change. At present, what we have are more and more achieving below expectations. This leads to the trend that you’d like to prevent.”

MY REPLY:
How do we get students to achieve at levels “above and beyond expectations”?
We need to employ all our resources. We need the business public to start valuing the diplomas that K-12 schools issue by stating they will first hire those students who came to school regularly, on time and prepared as well as those who did well on tests.
We need parents to prepare students for school by feeding them and clothing them properly, by teaching them the alphabet and how to count and add. We need the parents/guardians to supply a properly lit, environment where child can study without interruption or distraction.
We need policy makers and politicians to stop paying lip service to how committed they are to improving education and start realizing that they can’t do so without vesting proper amounts of money and not cutting school budgets.
We need educators who believe, in their heart of hearts, that all children can learn; that some take longer than others and that we need to help those who most need our help.

The Los Angeles Times reported, that the California exit examination was keeping at least 22,500 California students a year from graduating who would otherwise fulfill all their requirements. The exam is keeping a disproportionate numbers of girls and non-whites from graduating. It also found that the exam, which became a graduation requirement in 2007, has “had no positive effect on student achievement.”

The exit exam, which students can take multiple times beginning in their sophomore year, includes math and English tests, with the math aligned to eighth-grade standards and English to 10th-grade standards. It has been criticized both for being too easy and for unfairly denying a diploma to students who otherwise might graduate.

The study, funded by the private, nonprofit James Irvine Foundation, is based on analysis of data from four large California school districts, those in Fresno, Long Beach, San Diego and San Francisco. Reardon said the results were very similar for all four districts, suggesting that the conclusions had broad application for all California schools.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that the exam was toughest on students in the bottom quarter of their class, based on state standardized test scores. That was also where the study found the strongest inequality of results.

“Graduation rates declined by 15 to 19 percentage points for low-achieving black, Hispanic and Asian students when the exit exam was implemented, and declined only one percentage point . . . for similar white students,” the study said. Low-achieving girls had a 19 percentage-point drop in their graduation rate, compared with a decrease of 12 percentage points for boys.

https://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-meexitexam22-2009apr22,0,918646.story

The 10th anniversary of the Columbine massacre has brought renewed attention to violence in schools. The reality, in spite of the media attention, is that violence at schools across the country has been decreasing for a number of years.

However, violence in schools has not disappeared. Consider:

— Eighty-six percent of public schools in 2005-06 reported that one or more violent incidents, thefts of items valued at $10 or greater or other crimes had occurred — a rate of 46 crimes per 1,000 enrolled students.

— Almost a third of students ages 12 to 18 reported being bullied inside school.

— Nearly a quarter of teenagers reported the presence of gangs at their schools.

The statistics appear in a federal report, Indicators of School Crime and Safety published last month, the latest in a series on crime in schools nationwide. The annual reports, a combined effort of the Education and Justice departments, use the most recent statistics available. Federal authorities cull information from a handful of surveys and studies. For the 2009 report, much of the data came from the 2006-07 school year, when an estimated 55.5 million students were enrolled from pre-kindergarten through grade 12.

It is important for parents to realize that extreme violence is very rare at school. The more prevalent type of crime [and abuse] is theft and bullying or peer harassment.

According to a new report, “Changing Patterns of Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States,” released by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. unmarried mothers gave birth to 4 out of every 10 babies born in the United States in 2007, a share that is increasing rapidly both here and abroad.

Before 1970, most unmarried mothers were teenagers. But in recent years the birthrate among unmarried women in their 20s and 30s has soared “” rising 34 percent since 2002, for example, in women ages 30 to 34. In 2007, women in their 20s had 60 percent of all babies born out of wedlock, teenagers had 23 percent and women 30 and older had 17 percent.

Much of the increase in unmarried births has occurred among parents who are living together but are not married, cohabitation arrangements that tend to be less stable than marriages, studies show.

The pattern has been particularly pronounced among Hispanic women, climbing 20 percent from 2002 to 2006, the most recent year for which racial breakdowns are available. Eleven percent of unmarried Hispanic women had a baby in 2006, compared with 7 percent of unmarried black women and 3 percent of unmarried white women, according to government data drawn from birth certificates.

Out-of-wedlock births are also rising in much of the industrialized world: in Iceland, 66 percent of children are born to unmarried mothers; in Sweden, the share is 55 percent. (In other societies, though, the phenomenon remains rare “” just 2 percent in Japan, for example.)

Children born out of wedlock in the United States tend to have poorer health and educational outcomes than those born to married women, but that may be because unmarried mothers tend to share those problems.

Some experts speculate that marriage or cohabitation cements financial and emotional bonds between children and fathers that survive divorce or separation, improving outcomes for children. But since familial instability is often damaging to children, they may be better off with mothers who never cohabitate or marry than with those who form unions that are later broken.

The District of Columbia and Mississippi had the highest rates of out-of-wedlock births in 2007: 59 percent and 54 percent, respectively. The lowest rate, 20 percent, was in Utah. In New York, the rate was 41 percent; in New Jersey, 34 percent; and in Connecticut, 35 percent.

What are the implications for educators? Are the children of unmarried mothers at greater risk of dropping out than those of married mothers? The data indicate that there is some correlation between single parents and children dropping out of school. Are the single parents who are giving birth from the lower economic group which also correlates to a higher dropout rate?

Among the 7,034 Oregon students who dropped out of school during 2007-08 or over the following summer, nearly half made it to senior year before they quit, the state reported this morning.

New figures from the Oregon Department of Education show that 3,238 students dropped out during their senior year, including 536 who stuck it out through their entire senior year but didn’t earn enough credits to get a diploma.

Overall, 3.7 percent of Oregon high school students dropped out during the year, the lowest rate recorded since the state began tracking dropouts.

Nearly 36,000 students graduated in Oregon’s class of 2008, the state reported.

We have data that this is in keeping with the national data. Of the total of all high school dropouts 16.6% dropout in the senior year. In other words they are saying, with 9 months or fewer, it doesn’t pay for us to stick around.

There may be a number of different reasons why this is true. The students who dropout may be aware that they lack the necessary number of credits for them to graduate. Some drop out in order to pursue other alternatives, i.e., go to work, join the military, or go to college without a high school diploma. Others may drop out because of boredom. The Gates Foundation report, The Silent Epidemic, stated that the major reason that students dropout is because of boredom.

Schools have made major investments in the education of high school seniors. It is imperative that they determine why students drop out in the senior year and address the issue. I suggest that schools/districts look into the Georgia Department of Education’s Graduation Coaches and benchmark that effort.