World Education News

The need for objective measures of student achievement to assess the effectiveness of schools has crossed over from K-12 academic institutions into the realm of higher education. The number of college students being asked to take skills tests is growing with the results having an increasing impact on educational policy.

However, the results of the exams infrequently have any impact on the students themselves, and a new paper from the Educational Testing Service looks at whether that has a bearing on the relevance of the exam results. In other words, if the students don’t care about the outcomes of the exams, does that mean that the exams don’t serve as an accurate reflection of their knowledge?

So-called Parent Trigger Laws, which under certain circumstances allow parents to ‘take over’ a failing public school and determine its new path, are about to get more attention due to the nationwide opening of Won’t Back Down, a story of a parent whose daughter is continuously failed by the school system teaming with a teacher to bring change to their public school.

At the moment the story told in the movie is fiction in at least one important way. There hasn’t yet been a successful attempt by parents to take over a public school — but there might be soon. There is an ongoing attempt by a group of parents to make use of California’s parent trigger law to take control of an elementary school, and just like in the movie, the full might of the local education establishment has now arrayed against them.

An increasing number of schools are now beginning to administer standardized tests to students as early as kindergarten, Reuters reports.

And the trend shows no sign of reversing. A new exam meant to make sure that kids are on track to succeed in college or a career upon graduation from high school is on the way as well.

At least Paul Weeks, who in his capacity as the president of ACT Inc knows a thing or two about standardized tests, realizes that the idea of testing kindergarteners for career readiness might sound odd at the time when most aspire to be superheroes, since the exams the company is rolling out are unlikely to detect incipient x-ray vision skills. Yet, Weeks is very serious that the exam, which is meant to be administered yearly between the ages of 8 and 18 will serve as a good predictor of post-high school success, and which seeks to identify development in skills vital to that success such as critical thinking.

Fearing that the recent Chicago teachers strike might have eroded union support across the country, labor organizations are ponying up for an extensive publicity campaign to improve their image. The Washington Times is reporting that an umbrella group for many of the nation’s teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers, will be holding community events in cities all over the U.S in the waning weeks of the 2012 election season.

Some speculate that this new push is an indication that far from being chastened by the events in Chicago, the unions are going on the offensive.

The SAT Report of College and Career Readiness, released by The College Board, the company that administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) used by colleges to assess student knowledge and potential, finds that less than 45% of current high school graduates have the skills necessary to succeed at college-level work. The information, drawn from the SAT results of students who graduated high school in 2012, shows that 43% of the students met the standards that correlate to a high likelihood of college success set out by the SAT College & Career Readiness Benchmark.

Research has shown that those who meet the benchmark are more likely to not only attend college but maintain a high grade point average, more likely to stay in school after the first year and more likely to graduate on time.

In the frantic final campaigning days of the 2012 election season, the two Presidential candidates have been trading barbs over their relationship – or lack thereof – with teachers unions around the country.

While the Chicago teachers strike was going on, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney accused President Barack Obama of allowing teachers unions to dictate policy to the detriment of their students. Romney pointed out that Obama went so far as to send his most visible proxy – Vice President Joe Biden – to speak about the Administration’s support for the union at their annual convention. In reply, President Obama has said that Romney’s comments during the strike amounted to “teacher-bashing.”

Education insiders can be considered gaming skeptics, and now The Hechinger Report has made an attempt to understand why. Many futurists in education have touted the potential of video game technology to transform the way students learn — most recently during NBC’s Education Nation summit — yet there is still doubt that the gamification of eduction will have a positive impact on student achievement.

Mostly, the skepticism is fueled by a lack of solid data. Research that backs up the rosy projections is still thin, and even the argument that games can increase student engagement don’t sound convincing. Engagement is difficult to define, much less measure, and there’s still nothing that links increased engagement with improved academic outcomes.

A report release by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — especially one dealing with education — usually leads to hand-wringing in the U.S. due to the typically middling rankings compared to other developed countries. The latest Education at a Glance report, however, will serve as an exception.

According to the data compiled by OECD, while college graduation rates around the world have continued to rise and many developed countries now have 30% of their population receive a college-equivalent diploma, the U.S, with more than 40%, remains one of the highest producers of college graduates in the world.

The Pennsylvania Legislature has convened for a short session before the election — and charter school reform is heading up the agenda.

The Patriot News is reporting that Governor Tom Corbett is hoping that now is the time for the bill that would give the state more power in the regulation of charter schools. Right before the legislature adjourned its summer session in June, it came “within a sentence” of putting a version of the bill on Corbett’s desk.

Although Corbett is making charters a priority — he said last week that reforming the way charter schools in the state are regulated will aid all education stake holders in PA — it will not be the only issue before lawmakers this session.

BBC News has reported that Clydesdale Bank has announced that as a gesture of goodwill, it will forgive the debts of 27 schools around Britain accrued as part of a massive school technology lease scam. According to the BBC’s news program Panorama, as many as 169 schools might have been swindled by the program, and as many as 10 head teachers have resigned as a result.

Two firms, LTM and DTS, convinced the schools to sign deals that would provide them with office equipment like computers and copiers at as much as ten times the price that could be obtained elsewhere. Under the deal structure, the schools were left to pay off these expenses even in the cases where the equipment wasn’t delivered or was delivered damaged.

Collin Altic, a 14-year-old freshman from Willard High School in Willard, Missouri, recently found himself the victim of a new policy aimed at reducing the amount of money lost annually in school lunch charges. When Altic attempted to pay for his lunch earlier this week, he was told that he’d have to return his tray because his school lunch account didn’t have enough of a balance to cover the purchase.

Administrators explained that the new policy, which is in place only in the district’s high school, forbids any charges that puts the account into a negative balance. With 4,000 kids the overages were taking a real bite out of the school budget. Last year, Willard School District had to eat more than $20,000 in debit lunch payments that were never made up.

With one in three children in the U.S. now classified as overweight or obese, there’s an increasing focus on helping overweight kids navigate challenging environments — in particular, the school hallways and classrooms. One person working on this goal is Dr. Yolanda Hancock, a former elementary school teacher, whose patients need guidance on how to navigate the unique challenges that come from being an overweight student.

Kavitha Cardoza, writing about Hancock for NPR, explains that her patient list includes children are 12 and younger who have the body mass index as high as 47. On the day Cardoza visits her office, Hancock is examining a 13-year-old boy who weighs nearly 260 lbs and whose appearance indicates that he is pre-diebetic.

A loss for UK universities might be a gain for schools abroad, The Daily Telegraph reports. According to Graeme Paton, universities from outside the UK — including many Ivy League colleges in the US — are launching efforts to recruit students from England who are feeling disillusioned by the higher education system in the country due to the controversy over the rising tuition fees.

Last year, colleges and universities in the US played host to nearly 9,000 British undergraduates — and there are some who are predicting that this number will rise steeply in coming years due to the narrowing of the gap in the expense of attending school at home and abroad. For evidence, they are looking at the number of kids taking US college entrance exams like the SAT and the ACT has gone up by 30% over the past several years, with companies administering the exam expanding the number of the centers around the country to accommodate growing demand.

The New York Times is reporting that, contrary to expectations, a year-old New York City pilot program that distributed contraceptives like morning-after pills to high school students for free has encountered very little vocal opposition from parents. The program, which originally operated at 14 schools before one of the campuses dropped out, sought to emulate the approach used by privately-operated school-based health clinics which have been serving students in NYC for the past several years.

Although the health clinics have proved successful, they only provide access to about a quarter of the city’s students. The city-run program was supposed to fill this gap, with the schools chosen to participate specifically selected because their students don’t have nearby medical providers and run a higher risk than average for teen pregnancy and acquiring sexually transmitted infections.

Parents were given a chance to opt their children out of the program by returning a signed form to the school. They could also select the kind of reproductive health services their children could and could not receive. According to the data provided by the Department of Education, only about one or two percent of parents actually returned the forms.

 

There are 12 district and 9 charter schools opening in the Bronx this fall, with each offering a different structure and specialty emphasis. They offer a clean slate for incoming students with several schools in the borough closing or phasing out. The degree of difference between them is stark as they cater to very specific interests and career aspirations. For example, three career and technical schools have closed in the Bronx, and the gap is being filled by the new School for Tourism and Hospitality opening on the Jane Addams campus. According to principal David Martin, students will be able earn front desk supervisor certifications from the American Hotel and Lodging Institute.

The passage of a compromise bill to deal with the public release of teacher evaluation information marks a victory for the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. The proposal, which the governor said was a “take it or leave it proposition,” will make evaluation scores available publicly, but will not associate them with teachers’ names, except in cases when the parents wish to find out the scores of their kids’ current teachers.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that recent data released by the New York City Department of Education shows that the level of parental involvement with the school system has fallen to a new low this year. The information is giving ammunition to critics of both the Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott for fostering a culture at the Department of Education that is “unresponsive to families.”

All indications seem to be that the efforts by Walcott to increase parental engagement haven’t paid off, as the participation in phone calls, attendance at parent-teacher conferences and school-hosted workshops during the 2011-2012 academic year was substantially lower than the year before. In some cases, parents and guardians of students were 50% less likely to interact with teachers over the course of the year than they were during 2008-2009. In the instance of parent-coordinator workshops, the attendance fell from over 450,000 to less than 270,000 between 2009-10 and 2010-11.

A recent report by the New York Civil Liberties Union has criticized the quality of the sexual education curriculum used by districts all over the state of New York. Some of the curriculum materials — which the group characterized as “inaccurate, incomplete and biased” — didn’t cover topics such as condom use and safe sex, and fewer than half provided information on sexual orientation.

If Syracuse, NY’s education leaders have reviewed the latest research about the usefulness of recess, the new schedules designed for their elementary schools give no hints of it.

One of the requirements for the No Child Left Behind Act waiver granted to Minnesota was that the state develop a process to identify and label underachieving schools to subject them to corrective actions. The guidelines developed by the state, which identify roughly 213 schools as not meeting performance requirements in some manner, are much less stringent than those that would be applied under NCLB, which would have made more than 1,000 of the state schools subject to financial and administrative sanctions.

In February, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo famously claimed the title of ‘student lobbyist’ and heralded his breakthrough in holding the state’s teachers to standards of accountability.

When New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg first came into office, he promised that, as a service to the city’s students, he would work to end teacher “tenure as we know it.” If the numbers released by the Education Department this year are any indication, Bloomberg is well on his way to fulfilling his promise. Compared to 2007, when nearly 89% of all teachers who completed the three-year probationary period received tenure, this year saw nearly half of eligible teachers denied tenure.

As a result of the No Child Left Behind waiver received by New York State earlier this year, public schools that fail to meet performance targets set by the law will no longer have to provide tutoring services to their students. Still, principals who choose to continue offering it may do so — at least until the end of this school year.

The two-year pilot program experimenting with changes to the way special needs students are educated in New York City is set to conclude — and soon, nearly all the schools in the New York City public school system will begin adopting inclusion changes into their own academic program. The aim of the changes is to allow special needs students to integrate more fully into the regular student body. District officials are attempting to move away from the more traditional method of special ed instruction with segregated classes, and the city’s chief academic officer,Shael Polakow-Suransky, sums up the old programs that focus on “self-containment” as an academic death sentence.

Is the primary motivation behind the school reform movement financial? asks Carol Burris in an editorial for the Washington Post. A recent commercial released by former Washington D.C’s chancellor of public schools Michelle Rhee, claims that public schools trying to compete in the new academic marketplace is akin to a couch potato trying to stack up against Olympic athletes. Now Burris, the principal of the South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York, along with Harry Leonadartos, who is the principal of Clarkstown High School North in Rockland County, are asking if the derision often heaped on traditional public schools by eduction reform advocates is a good way to motivate them to improve.

Bonuses of $20,000 offered by the Obama Administration as an incentive for “master teachers” in mathematics, science and technology have been put out of reach for teachers in one of the nation’s largest school districts. Teachers employed by the New York City school district may not apply to receive the federally-funded money because the terms of the contract their union signed with the city prohibits any kind of financial bonuses for outstanding achievements in the classroom.

Students were mistakenly told that they failed a state exam and couldn’t graduate from their elementary or middle schools, instead attending summer school.

 

 Elementary and middle schoolers from all over New York City were blocked from attending their school graduations because a snafu at the NYC Department of Education had them marked as failing their end-of-year state exams. According to the New York Post, the Department realized its mistake after the exam results were released last week, but it was too late for most of the nearly 7,000 student affected since their graduation ceremonies had already taken place.