Archives for June 2009

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.