Eight years ago, Granger High in Washington’s Yakima Valley was a typical high-poverty, low-performing school, writes Karin Chenoweth of Education Trust in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Only 20 percent of students met reading standards; only half graduated. Gangs were active; graffiti marred the campus. Nobody expected more from the children of farmworkers: 80 percent are [...]
Archive for October, 2008
What’s wrong with Baltimore’s Douglass High? Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane says it’s all summed up by Audie, who’s interviewed 25 minutes into the HBO documentary Hard Times at Douglass High.
“This what we do,” Audie said about a bunch of students roaming the halls and standing around aimlessly. “Just walking the halls all day, baby. [...]
A second-grade white girl’s “N the N-word” T-shirt was a “distraction” at her mostly nonwhite school, said the principal, who made Jaiden Haber change.
Jaiden said she didn’t understand the statement she was making with her shirt. “My mom picked it out,” she said. “She thought it would look nice on me. I don’t know [...]
We can expect all students to go to college, said Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation in an NPR interview.
And maybe they are not coming in with the right reading or math skills, but we are going to bring them up, and we are going to have high expectations of them.
NPR also asked [...]
Robert Wright, a San Jose middle school teacher, saved some “deselected” library books from the Dumpster:
Tituba of Salem Village
The October Country by Ray Bradbury
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Black Stallion
The Yearling (2 copies)
Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (3 copies)
Child of the Holocaust
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
How Green Was My Valley
The [...]
Career academies combining vocational and academic classes show long-term success in improving students’ earnings, especially for males, reports an MDRC study.
Eight years after graduation, career academy participants are more likely to be employed than those who applied for academies but didn’t get in; they also earn more.
The participants were mainly Hispanic and black, and [...]
The federal Reading First report, which found little difference in reading performance in schools that got federal funds, proves nothing, writes Karin Chenoweth on Britannica blog. It’s an apples-apples problem: If some schools got RF funds, districts often changed reading instruction in all schools.
Sadly, Congress seems eager to defund a program that most educators [...]
Elementary math teachers need to understand math better in order to teach effectively, concludes a new study by the National Council on Teacher Quality.
With some exceptions, elementary education programs spend too little time on elementary math topics, the report concluded. Teacher candidates don’t really understand why arithmetic and multiplication work.
In addition, ed schools take [...]
Most New York City charter schools are outperforming schools in their district.
When compared to the overall scores for the school districts in which they are located, some charter schools — such as Bronx Preparatory in the South Bronx and the KIPP Infinity school in Harlem — had as much as double the portion of [...]
In Fast Times at Gloucester High, Michele Catalano blames parents for raising daughters who think having a baby at 16 is a good idea. As one grandmother says: At least her daughter, who dropped out of high school to have a baby, isn’t a prostitute or a junkie.
This is not an issue about sex. This [...]
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