Play v. Reading: How Flawed Thinking About Preschool Has Become Accepted Practice

Play v. Reading: How Flawed Thinking About Preschool Has Become Accepted Practice

Play v. Reading: How Flawed Thinking About Preschool Has Become Accepted Practice

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

~Fred Rogers

One education topic that every politician running for office mentions is preschool for all. What do they mean? What do they think preschool should be about?

It’s common knowledge that children are capable of learning much the first years of life. This doesn’t mean it’s right to douse them with developmentally advanced information they aren’t ready to learn.

Many kindergarten teachers expect more from children when they enter kindergarten than they did years past. Kindergarten play kitchens and art easels were discarded long ago. Young children are lucky if they get recess breaks. 

Because kindergarten has become more advanced, preschool is seen as the time children must have prereading skills for kindergarten. If they don’t, it’s seen as a red flag. This makes teachers and parents push children to learn to read early.

Children are expected to know letters and numbers, even basic sight words. They’re CONTINUE READING: Play v. Reading: How Flawed Thinking About Preschool Has Become Accepted Practice

L.A. Unified’s Mathematical Apartheid – Dropout Nation

L.A. Unified’s Mathematical Apartheid – Dropout Nation

L.A. Unified’s Mathematical Apartheid

Based simply on how it miseducates Black and Latino children, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in America, is even more racist in its outcomes than the larger and notoriously racist New York City public schools. Dropout Nation readers, who have read numerous pieces here about the district, have long ago known this. But the crisis bears repeating over and over again.

As mathematics is increasingly important for employment and participation in society, we can take the extent to which L.A. Unified is successful—or not—teaching mathematics as a meaningful indicator of its success as an educational institution. We can look at whether it is successful in educating all the children in its care.

First, some context.  Los Angeles, the city, has roughly the same number of residents reporting themselves to the Census as “White alone” as “Hispanic” at two million each, nearly half a million reporting as “Asian,” and not quite 400,000 reporting as “Black or African American.” [The surrounding communities also served by L.A. Unified differ little demographically from L.A. itself.] These proportions are quite different from those of the nation, with 236 million “White alone,” 41.4 million “Black or African American,” 58.8 million “Hispanic,” and 18 million “Asian alone.”

Los Angeles is less White, more Hispanic, less Black and more Asian that the United States in general. However, as with the rest of the nation, White, non-Hispanic, and Asian residents of the city have higher incomes and higher levels of educational attainment—factors increasingly tightly linked—than its Hispanic and Black residents. It is not too much to say that it is because the city’s White, non-Hispanic, and Asian residents have higher levels of educational attainment that they have higher incomes.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress measures Mathematics, Reading and other subjects at grades 4, 8, and 12.  The assessments at grade 8 are useful as CONTINUE READING: L.A. Unified’s Mathematical Apartheid – Dropout Nation

How The Post’s analysis compares to other studies of school segregation - The Washington Post

How The Post’s analysis compares to other studies of school segregation - The Washington Post

How The Post’s analysis compares to other studies of school segregation

The Washington Post’s analysis of U.S. public schools finds an increase in students attending integrated schools. Some other studies appear to find the opposite. Why the difference?

The Post analysis differed from others chiefly with its focus on integration in school districts throughout the country. It included rural, majority-white school systems, as well as big cities where most students are black or Hispanic. It found many of the newly integrated districts used to be overwhelmingly white. In most cases, whites remain in the majority.

The Post focused on the student body within school districts, whereas other studies focus on students’ presence on a metro or statewide basis. The Post analysis measured integration only for districts that had enough racial diversity to allow for integration — what we call diverse districts.

In addition, this analysis uses a measure of segregation that accounts for demographic change in each school system, whereas others do not.

How the nation’s growing racial diversity is changing our schools

Q: Why was it important to look outside of big cities? Aren’t most students in large metro areas?

A: Schools in most big city districts, and many big suburbs, have long been segregated. The Post analysis finds that segregation often persists. But it also found that a surge of Latinos moving into smaller communities has translated into a big jump in the number of diverse school districts, and it found that those newly diverse districts were far more integrated than the big urban districts. These newly diverse districts are typically small on their own, but they add up to millions more children being educated in integrated schools than in 1995, the first year for which national data is available. CONTINUE READING: How The Post’s analysis compares to other studies of school segregation - The Washington Post

So What? The Importance of Knowing about “Success” and “Failure” in American Schools (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

So What? The Importance of Knowing about “Success” and “Failure” in American Schools (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

So What? The Importance of Knowing about “Success” and “Failure” in American Schools (Part 1)

The next few posts are drawn from the final chapter of “Chasing Success and Confronting Failure in American Schools.” The book is scheduled to come out in March 2020.

So What?

Why should readers care about defining individual and institutional “success” and “failure” in U.S. schools? Why should readers care about the past and present existence of American core values stuffed with notions of “success” and “failure” and how schools transmit these values? Finally, why should readers care about two uncommon public schools (MetWest High School in Oakland, California and Social Justice Humanitas Academy in Los Angeles Unified District) that display these shared values and yet expand familiar definitions of organizational “success” in ways that most U.S. schools do not?

My answer to these “So What” questions is that definitions of institutional and individual “success” and “failure” applied to U.S. schools show up daily in the taken-for-granted institution called the age-graded school. Within the age-graded school, judgments of “success” and “failure” are inherent in student, teacher, principal, school board, and superintendent actions, memos, and social media. In age-graded schools numbers and subjective decisions identify winners and losers through student report cards, teacher evaluations, and district accountability ratings.

But even of greater importance is that amid this organization’s extraordinary stability in American life, over a century of school reform has tried to overhaul it, CONTINUE READING: So What? The Importance of Knowing about “Success” and “Failure” in American Schools (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

School Safety Tech Raises Questions About Student Privacy : NPR

School Safety Tech Raises Questions About Student Privacy : NPR

School Safety Tech Raises Questions About Student Privacy

In a photo taken last March, a teenage boy is sitting at his desk with a plastic pellet gun that looks a lot like an AR-15. The airsoft rifle is propped up on the arm of a chair, pointing at the ceiling, and the boy, Eric, is looking at the camera. We're not using his last name to protect his privacy.

Eric's friend took the picture. At the time, Eric says, he didn't realize his friend had captioned the photo "Don't come to school Monday" and had sent it to others on Snapchat.

"I don't think he really had the intention of getting me in trouble," Eric says, explaining his friend's post as "dark humor."

But Eric, who is now in 10th grade, did get in trouble.

Someone reported the photo to Miami-Dade County Public Schools, where Eric is a student. Two police officers and Eric's principal took him out of class to question him. "I was terrified," Eric says. "They think that I wanted to shoot up the school, and I didn't. I didn't want to at all."

Eric was recommended for expulsion. His parents fought it, explaining that he didn't take the picture, caption it or send it to anyone himself. Ultimately, he was moved CONTINUE READING: School Safety Tech Raises Questions About Student Privacy : NPR

Is New York state about to gut its student data privacy law? - The Washington Post

Is New York state about to gut its student data privacy law? - The Washington Post

Is New York state about to gut its student data privacy law?

The ever-growing use of technology by schools, districts and states around the country to collect data on students continues to fuel concerns about the security of that information. Some states have passed laws to protect such information from being sold to third parties, but there is a huge, lucrative market for student data.

New York state has a student privacy law, but the Board of Regents is considering whether to significantly weaken it. The post below looks at the problem in New York and elsewhere.

It was written by Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, a nonprofit based in New York City, and the co-chair of the national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, a national alliance of parents and advocates defending the rights of parents and students to protect their data. She successfully led the battle to stop nine states from disclosing personal student data to a student database project called inBloom.

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

https://www.studentprivacymatters.org

ACT and the College Board were asked about comments in the story about selling student data to third parties. Their responses follow Haimson's piece.

The astonishing amount of data being collected about your children

By Leonie Haimson

The New York Board of Regents is currently considering whether to approve a radical weakening of the state student privacy law, which would allow the College Board, the ACT and other companies that contract with schools or districts to administer tests to use the personal student information they collect for marketing purposes — even though the original New York law that was passed in 2014 explicitly barred the sale or commercial use of this data.

Starting in 2014, many states, including New York, approved legislation to strengthen the protection of student privacy, because of a growing realization on the part of parents that their children’s personal data was being shared by schools and districts with a wide variety of private companies and organizations without their knowledge or consent. The U.S. Department of Education had weakened the federal student privacy law known as FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) twice over the past decade, rewriting the regulations during the Bush CONTINUE READING: Is New York state about to gut its student data privacy law? - The Washington Post

How Vocational Education Got a 21st Century Reboot - POLITICO Magazine

How Vocational Education Got a 21st Century Reboot - POLITICO Magazine

How Vocational Education Got a 21st Century Reboot
With schools across 10 states, the P-TECH program prepares its students for good jobs that corporations pay well

NEWBURGH, N.Y. — Suriana Rodriguez is only 19, but she’s already lined up a full-time job at IBM. After her junior year in high school, she interned at the tech giant’s Poughkeepsie, N.Y., campus, 20 miles north of her hometown, for $17 an hour. For a year, Rodriguez has worked 40-hour weeks as an apprentice test technician, examining IBM mainframes to confirm they work before shipping them to customers. In January, she’ll move to a permanent position with a future salary that she says, is “definitely much more than I ever thought I’d be making at 19.”

Rodriguez’s opportunities with IBM came to her thanks to her high school, Newburgh Free Academy P-TECH. It’s part of an innovative public-school model that combines grade 9-12 education with internships and tuition-free community college. P-TECH, which stands for Pathways in Technology Early College High School, has spread to 10 states and 17 countries since its founding in Brooklyn in 2011. The P-TECH network is growing fast. By the end of 2019, there will be 220 P-TECH schools in operation. With 93,000 students nationwide, it is one of the most extensive career and technical education programs in the United States.

For public school districts, starting P-TECH schools is a way to try to address the “skills gap”—American education’s often-elusive goal of tying vocational training to what actual employers such as IBM and Cisco and Microsoft want. It focuses on the much-valued STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and math. It aims to prepare students for so-called new collar jobs: work in tech that requires more than a high school diploma, but not always a four-year college degree. And at a time when free college education is surging toward the top of the progressive agenda, it’s an affordable free-college program that’s taken root in poorer cities, boosting high school graduation rates and two-year-college completion rates among CONTINUE READING: How Vocational Education Got a 21st Century Reboot - POLITICO Magazine

Rednecks, Hillbillies, and Crackers | radical eyes for equity

Rednecks, Hillbillies, and Crackers | radical eyes for equity

Rednecks, Hillbillies, and Crackers

Before my father graduated high school, he had a full set of false teeth. Finding—and later being able to afford—dentures that fit well were an important part of his life for sixty years.

Once his health began to deteriorate nearly as precipitously as his bank account in the last several years, that final set of dentures, lower quality and cost, made him look even less like himself than the disorienting transformation from aging and ill health—both making him enlarge, barrel-chested and swollen, as he simultaneously shrank in stature.

My father was a rough and rambunctious 1950s redneck growing up, losing teeth a few at a time from playing sports and the occasional fight. His dentist eventually decided to pull the last few and fit him with false teeth.

My mother, my sister, and I, then, never knew my father when he had teeth.

This was part of my 1960s childhood, a redneck life in Upstate South Carolina, my father’s home town. It seems fair to say that my mother was, as a North Carolinian raised mostly in Lexington and Lumberton, a hillbilly of sorts.

But theirs was no mixed marriage.

In fact, it took me many years, and well after I had moved out, to recognize CONTINUE READING: Rednecks, Hillbillies, and Crackers | radical eyes for equity

TODAY'S SPECIAL Education Research Report

Education Research Report

TODAY'S SPECIAL Education Research Report

Millions more American children are attending school with students of other races, even as many urban schools remain deeply segregated

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / now

The number of children attending U.S. public schools with students of other races has nearly doubled over the past quarter century, a little-noticed surge that reflects the nation’s shifting demographics, a Washington Post analysis has found. At the same time, children in most big cities and many suburbs remain locked in deeply segregated districts, with black students more likely to be enrolled

'Nudging' Helps STEM Students at 2-Year Colleges

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 41min

The purpose of this implementation report is to help community college leaders, foundations, and public education policymakers understand the impact that nudges have on student success, especially for students from populations that typically have low rates of college completion. The promising results of the NTSS initiative reflect the opportunities that nudging offers, and they have important imp

YESTERDAY

2019 State of Computer Science Education

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 14h

The Computer Science Teachers Association. along with Code.org and the Expanding Computing Education Pathways (ECEP) Alliance , a National Science Foundation Broadening Participation in Computing funded Alliance, has released the report. The report describes the policy trends and momentum over the past 12 months and contains: an analysis of national and state trends in AP CS by gender and race,

More Than One in Four Students Attend Schools with High or Extreme Levels of Chronic Absence

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 14h

This report describes how chronic absence and conditions for learning are interconnected issues that can have an impact on a child's educational success. The report identifies specific conditions for learning that can improve school experiences for students and staff and help reduce absenteeism and improve academic outcomes. It includes brief case studies from the state of Georgia and the Clevela

Education at a Glance 2019

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 16h

Education at a Gla nce is the authoritative source for information on the state of education around the world. It provides data on the structure, finances and performance of education systems across OECD countries and a number of partner economies. More than 100 charts and tables in this publication – as well as links to much more available on the educational database – provides key information o

Adolescents with high levels of physical activity perform better in school over two years

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 18h

Adolescents with higher levels of physical activity performed better in school during transition from primary school to lower secondary school than their physically inactive peers, a new study from Finland shows. However, the researchers, from the University of Jyväskylä, found that increased physical activity did not necessarily result in improved academic performance. Previous cross-sectional s

Time spent using social media associated with mental health problems among adolescents

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 18h

Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day using social media may be at higher risk for mental health problems. This observational study included a nationally representative sample of nearly 6,600 U.S. adolescents (ages 12-15) who reported time spent on social media during a typical day and who reported information about mental health problems. After accounting for factors including a hist

SEP 10

Education Policy Responses to the Opioid Crisis

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 2d

The opioid crisis is a top priority issue we continue to hear about and research. While most of the policy action taken related to the crisis has been in the health sector, state education leaders are looking for ways to address the direct and indirect implications on students through policy action. explores the connection between education policy and the opioid crisis, provides examples of rece

Career and Technical Education by Locale

by Jonathan Kantrowitz / 2d

Public high school graduates from towns and rural areas earn more credits in career and technical education (CTE) than do graduates from cities and suburban areas. The National Center for Education Statistics Data Point, 

Education Research Report