Are traumatized students disabled? A debate straight outta Compton | 89.3 KPCC

Are traumatized students disabled? A debate straight outta Compton | 89.3 KPCC:

Are traumatized students disabled? A debate straight outta Compton

The defendants may be one Southern California school district and its top officials, but an unprecedented, class action lawsuit could have a big impact on schools across the country.

Thursday in Los Angeles, a U.S. District Court judge will preside over the first hearing in the suit against the Compton Unified School District. To understand thecomplaint, you need to understand Compton.

The city has long had a violent reputation. Last year, its murder rate was more than five times the national average. Now, a handful of students say they've been traumatized by life in Compton and that the schools there have failed to give them the help they deserve.

The complaint is a terrifying read — of kids coping with physical and sexual abuse, addicted parents, homelessness, and a constant fear of violence.

One of the plaintiffs, listed as 15-year-old Phillip W., says he witnessed his first murder when he was 8.

"Somebody got shot in the back of the head with a shotgun," the boy explains in avideo on a website dedicated to the case. "And they threw him over the rail, and he was just sitting there bleeding, blood all down the sewer line. It was a horrifying sight."

The complaint says Phillip has witnessed more than 20 shootings and, in 2014, was hit in the knee by a bullet.

What's this have to do with Compton's schools?

Susan Ko of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress says exposure to violence can have a profound effect on the brain's ability to learn.

"That impacts concentration, the ability to just listen to what the teacher is saying, to understand what you're reading, to remember something that you learned or what the teacher just said," Ko says.

Not only that, many traumatized students live in a state of constant alarm. Innocent interactions like a bump in the hallway or a request from a teacher can stir anger and bad behavior.

The lawsuit alleges that, in Compton, the schools' reaction to traumatized students was too often punishment — not help.

"They were repeatedly either sent to another school, expelled or suspended — and Are traumatized students disabled? A debate straight outta Compton | 89.3 KPCC:

School choice on steroids - The Hechinger Report

School choice on steroids - The Hechinger Report:

School choice on steroids

New state programs allow students to opt out of their local public schools part time, taking classes online instead

Chatfield High School in Minnesota doesn’t offer sociology (or German, or criminology, for that matter), but when senior Keagan Clarke, 18, finished a fall semester class in psychology, his teacher suggested he try sociology.

Thanks to a relatively new state policy, all spring Clarke went to the school library during second period for an online sociology class.

“It was very cool,” said Clarke, noting it lived up to his psychology teacher’s description: “It was a very interesting topic with some things that will tie back to psychology.”

This initiative, often called “Course Choice” or “Course Access,” is, as one proponent described it, like “school choice on steroids.”

Proponents count at least 10 states that have adopted a collection of policies they began promoting as Course Access — policies that allow students to take classes part-time online (and sometimes in other off-campus classrooms) by choosing from a variety of providers, including charter schools and other districts, instead of being limited to their local course offerings or to one state virtual school. And the Course Access movement is gaining momentum as it expands across the country, with eight states adopting or considering such laws in just the last four years, according to a comprehensive report on Course Access sponsored by the conservative group the Foundation for Excellence in Education and the lobbying firm EducationCounsel.

For Clarke and other students, online schools mean options, but for school district officials, they can mean less revenue, as education dollars flow toward charter schools or other districts that offer the School choice on steroids - The Hechinger Report:

Child Trauma and Schools | Education Town Hall Forum: Weekly Broadcast Archives, Extended Discussion, plus Monthly BUS Ride

Child Trauma and Schools | Education Town Hall Forum: Weekly Broadcast Archives, Extended Discussion, plus Monthly BUS Ride:

Child Trauma and Schools

Nearly half of all children in the United States have experienced trauma, according to recent research. Children in underserved communities face trauma at a higher rate and are more likely to experience repeated trauma or more than one type.

Gun violence persistently affects students and families in many neighborhoods in cities like Washington, DC, with an uptick in incidents and related stress this summer, for example. Families in St. Louis, MO, were gassed last night as part of police response to protests, and students around the country have experienced similar stresses. In some areas, children experience trauma relating to natural disasters or fires. Episodic or chronic financial trouble, homelessness, domestic violence, and other factors also traumatize many children.

Results include attendance, behavioral, and academic problems. But research indicates that trauma-sensitive school environments can help students recover and thrive. Collaborations across the fields of education, psychology, law, and neurobiology have helped create policy and practice addressing this serious and common problem.

Several jurisdictions have taken steps to mandate and support trauma-sensitive or trauma-informed schools. In addition, a suit arguing that schools must address trauma like any other special need is moving through the federal courts

Last August, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted a “Safe and Supportive Schools” boosting the trauma-informed schools movement. Trauma-sensitive practices are also at work in Washington state and in San Francisco. In addition, the District of Columbia’s City Council held a roundtable on the topic in June.

At the time of the hearing, DC Children’s Law Center released a report Addressing Childhood Trauma in DC Schools. (CLC — Addressing Childhood Trauma in DC Schools–June 2015.) National organizations, including the Trauma and Learning Policy Institute and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, offer extensive research and resources for educators and policymakers. (See Washington Post “Trauma is hidden cause of academic struggles for many in DC, report finds.”)

Today, in Los Angeles, a federal judge is scheduled to consider several motions in the landmark case known as “Peter P., et al. v. Compton Unified School District, et al.” The suit was filed earlier this year by five student-plaintiffs who have experienced severe trauma and argue that Compton Unified School District (CUSD) failed to address their needs. Three Child Trauma and Schools | Education Town Hall Forum: Weekly Broadcast Archives, Extended Discussion, plus Monthly BUS Ride:

The stench of death in New Orleans and school reform. | Fred Klonsky

The stench of death in New Orleans and school reform. | Fred Klonsky:

The stench of death in New Orleans and school reform.

.

– By Corey Mitchell in EdWeek.

Billie Dolce’s memories of her final day as a teacher at Colton Middle School haunt her.

With Hurricane Katrina headed toward New Orleans, Dolce pleaded with her classroom aide, Gertrude Hackett, to flee the city and seek refuge with out-of-town relatives.

“Ms. Hackett, if they say evacuate, evacuate. Don’t stay here by yourself,” Dolce recalls telling her. “She said, ‘I won’t, Ms. Dolce, I won’t.’ ”

Hackett never made it out.

First responders found the 70-year-old submerged in water at the wheel of her car, her luggage packed in the trunk.

It was the first funeral Dolce attended after the storm.

But it wouldn’t be the last.

She saw former colleagues, parents, and students buried, casualties of the catastrophic storm and levee breaches that flooded the city.

“People’s hearts were broken,” Dolce says. “All this time later, some people still can’t stand when it rains hard and the wind blows.”

A decade later, the pain and symbolism are as profound for Dolce as they were in the storm’s fresh wake.

“Death sticks out to me,” the former special education teacher says. “Death from the The stench of death in New Orleans and school reform. | Fred Klonsky:

Kasich: ‘If I were king in America, I would abolish all teachers lounges where they sit together and worry about how woe is us’ - The Washington Post

Kasich: ‘If I were king in America, I would abolish all teachers lounges where they sit together and worry about how woe is us’ - The Washington Post:
Kasich: ‘If I were king in America, I would abolish all teachers lounges where they sit together and worry about how woe is us’

Ohio Gov. John Kasich said a number of interesting things Wednesday during an interview at an “education summit” where six candidates for the Republican presidential nomination spoke with education activist and former CNN host Campbell Brown.

The event, sponsored by Brown’s “The 74″ advocacy group and the conservative American Federation for Children, was centered on 45-minutes interviews that Brown did with Kasich, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

* There was the moment when Kasich looked in the audience and said that he believed that to make sure kids learn, “sometimes that means shaking it up a little bit.” Then he said to one specific woman: “See that cross you are wearing around your neck. The lord expects that. He expects us to get out of our comfort zone on the behalf of children. Because you see education is about unlocking this brain to discover and improve the world.”

* There was the moment when Kasich said without a hint of irony, “We’re not going to tolerate failed charter schools,” failing to mention that Ohio’s $1 billion charter sector is the most troubled in the country and that he and Republican lawmakers have failed to take serious action to hold these schools accountable.

Kasich did subtly suggest that it has been hard for Republican lawmakers to come around to putting some restrictions on awful charter schools, and he did recognize that some of the criticism of Ohio charters has been legitimate.

But he didn’t mention that a two-year effort to write legislation that would strengthen oversight of these schools passed in the state Senate in June, and was believed to have majority support in the state House — but, somehow, mysteriously, never made it to a final vote.

And as you might expect, there wasn’t a word — from Brown or Kasich — about the recent investigation that the Akron Beacon Journal did into Ohio charters, in which it found: “No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.” The newspaper had reviewed 4,263 audits released last year by the state and concluded that charter schools in the state appear to have misspent public money “nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.” It says that “since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools.”

Yet Kasich did tell Brown, “We’re not going to tolerate failure.”

*There was the moment when he took on all of those teachers lounging Kasich: ‘If I were king in America, I would abolish all teachers lounges where they sit together and worry about how woe is us’ - The Washington Post:

Report: States Lack Consistent Standards for Literacy Teacher Preparation -- THE Journal

Report: States Lack Consistent Standards for Literacy Teacher Preparation -- THE Journal:

Report: States Lack Consistent Standards for Literacy Teacher Preparation

Only 18 states require elementary teacher candidates to complete specific courses in literacy education, according to a report from the International Literacy Association.

The report, "Preliminary Report on Teacher Preparation for Literacy Instruction," is the first of a two-part report by the association's Teacher Preparation Task Force, which is examining the education and practical training of teachers in the United States and the requirements set out by the state departments of education.

Although the results are preliminary and the task force is conducting further investigation, the report reveals a lack of coursework and practical requirements for preservice teachers in many states.

"Surprisingly, our analysis showed only 18 states require specific courses in literacy for elementary teacher candidates, and half the states did not require specific coursework in any of the licensure areas," said Angela Rutherford, associate professor at the University of Mississippi and a member of the task force, in a prepared statement. "Further, there do not appear to be any requirements for literacy experiences during student teaching or other required practica."

To inform this preliminary report, the task force first reviewed the requirements for teacher preparation in literacy as published on 50 state department of education Web sites between July and October 2014. They then conducted interviews with department of education leaders from 23 states to verify and gain further insight into the data collected from the sites.

The 13-member task force is co-chaired by Deanna Birdyshaw, a lecturer at theUniversity of Michigan, and Elizabeth Swaggerty, associate professor of reading education at East Carolina University, and includes literacy experts from across the country.

Based on the their findings, the task force outlined four main recommendations:

• There is a need to conduct and share more systematic and comprehensive research into literacy teacher preparation programs;
• State standards and assessments of literacy teacher preparation should be research-based and of sufficient quality to inform teacher education curricula and certification guidelines;
• State guidelines for teacher preparation should provide explicit requirements for literacy teacher preparation; and
• All preservice teachers should be required to take part in literacy education activities during their practica.

"Our primary takeaway is that all stakeholders need to be involved in the conversation about how to improve preparation of preservice teachers to design and implement instruction that increases the literacy learning of children in kindergarten through grade 12," said Swaggerty in a prepared statement. "We hope this initial report is a starting point for that conversation."

The task force identified three main limitations of the preliminary report:

• Part two of the report is ongoing;
• Representatives from 15 of the 23 states departments of education who were interviewed said changes to their teacher certification requirements were being planned; and
• The representatives interviewed were not experts in literacy education.

As the task force prepares part two of the report, they plan to interview officials, administrators and professors from teacher education programs in all 50 states to find out how they are integrating the guidelines of the preliminary report.

The full preliminary report is available as a free PDF download from theInternational Literacy Association's site. Report: States Lack Consistent Standards for Literacy Teacher Preparation -- THE Journal:

Nashville schools finance team puts price on charters

Nashville schools finance team puts price on charters:

Nashville schools finance team puts price on charters

Metro Nashville Public Schools' finance department has created a formula placing an expense on opening a charter school.

The idea is akin to how the state assesses the financial impact of a bill on the state's coffers. At the district level, the process explains as closely as possible the cost of a new charter on the district's operating budget for short- and long-term planning purposes.

The district applied the formula to Tuesday night's KIPP Nashville application hearing, setting a precedent of tying charter fiscal impact into the application process.

The analysis seeks to give board members an informed decision about the impact of charters on the district — both academically, and now, fiscally. Board members can then prioritize — or not — charters in the operating budget, similar to how board members have set aside money for pre-kindergarten, literacy and English Language Learner programs.

THE TENNESSEAN

Debate over charter schools waste of time

"I think its a pretty accurate representation," said Chris Henson, interim director of schools. "We've tried to keep if fair and objective and we aren't trying to represent any one particular point of view."

Henson notes that charters haven't caused a negative balance on the operating budget but do cost money. And advanced planning is needed, which is why he's made the analysis a priority.

"Fiscal note is really just looking at something in a vacuum," he said. "It doesn't consider other choices that could be made or other reductions we can make."

The analysis uses three-year averages and determines the projected operating budget over a number of years.

It also looks at the projected cost of a charter school's enrollment based on a $9,000 per-pupil average. That amount factors fixed costs for the charter school such as employing an administrative team.

THE TENNESSEAN

School board can't make up mind on 2 charters

The district then looks at the expense of educating one student at a district-run school, without fixed costs such as busing or maintaining a principal at the school. On average, one student's education in the district costs $5,666 without fixed expenses. Some schools, however, cost more or less to educate one child.

The district then looks at the offset of educating one student at a charter and a district-run school.

The analysis does take into consideration the fixed costs of educating a student at a district-run school, but trying to calculate a value in the district is tricky, said Derek Richey, director of resource strategy. Instead, the district uses a formula to view how the district financially responds to enrollment changes.

THE TENNESSEAN

2 Nashville charters recommended as review process criticized

"Some of the assumptions can be argued for various philosophical reasons, too," Richey said. "We're trying to find the middle ground of the conversation so we can maximize taxpayer resources."

Capital expenses, such as opening a new school, are separate from the formula.Nashville schools finance team puts price on charters:

Racism in the classroom: the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is just regular bigotry - Vox

Racism in the classroom: the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is just regular bigotry - Vox:

Racism in the classroom: the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is just regular bigotry

When black teachers and white teachers are asked to sum up black high school students' potential, white teachers are much less likely to see black students as college material.And that's true even when they're discussing the same students.

A new study exploring how race influences teachers' perception of their students' abilities found that those expectations are racially biased.

When teachers are asked about their expectations for black students, nonblack teachers were 30 percent less likely than black teachers to say they thought those students would earn a college degree.

The implications are troubling, in part because the majority of public school students in the US are nonwhite but the majority of teachers are not.

How racial bias influences teachers' expectations

On average, black students have lower test scores than white students, they attend schools with fewer resources, and they are less likely to graduate from high school and college. Assuming that will continue to be the case is what President George W. Bush called "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

But Bush was usually talking about collective expectations. The researchers in the new study, published as a working paper by the Upjohn Institute, which specializes in employment research, didn't compare teachers' broad expectations for their black students with their expectations of white students. It looked at how teachers of different races perceived the potential of the same student — where race, theoretically, shouldn't make as much of a difference.

In 2002, as part of a study that followed high school sophomores through the educational system, the Education Department asked those students' math and reading teachers if they expected them to eventually earn a high school or college degree.

The researchers, Seth Gershenson, Stephen B. Holt, and Nicholas Papageorge, looked at how those expectations differed based on whether the teachers were the same race or sex as their student, using a data set of about 16,000 students. They found that teachers' expectations for their white students didn't differ based on the teachers' race, but that black teachers' expectations were significantly higher for their black students than white teachers' expectations were.

The differences were even larger when the teachers were of both a different sex and race than their students — particularly for white female teachers evaluating black male students.

"We cannot determine whether the black teachers are too optimistic, the non-black teachers are too pessimistic, or some combination of the two," Gershenson wrote in a blog post at the Brookings Institution. "This is nonetheless concerning, as teachers’ expectations likely shape student outcomes."

The "Pygmalion effect": Teachers' expectations matter

Teachers' opinions can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a famous experiment, two researchers administered an intelligence test to students at the beginning of the 1968 school year. The researchers gave teachers a list of the students they said were most Racism in the classroom: the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is just regular bigotry - Vox:

Does Cheats For Change Have A Turnover Problem | WPRI 12 Eyewitness News

RI Mayoral Academies leader tapped for national school reform gig | WPRI 12 Eyewitness News:

RI Mayoral Academies leader tapped for national school reform gig

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – The co-founder of Rhode Island Mayoral Academies (RIMA) is leaving his job to join one of the country’s most well-known school reform advocacy organizations.

Dr. Michael Magee, who helped launch RIMA with lieutenant governor and former Cumberland Mayor Daniel McKee, has been named the chief executive officer of Chiefs for Change, a national coalition of state and local superintendents known for supporting the Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluations.

“Throughout his career, Mike has demonstrated a sincere commitment to improving education in this country,” John White, Louisiana’s state superintendent of education and chairman of Chiefs for Change, said in a statement. “He is a visionary leader who has a proven ability to turn ideas into action that benefit families, educators, and children. I’m pleased to have him as the first CEO of Chiefs for Change.”

• Related: 9 things to know about RI’s charter school battle
• Also: Everything you need to know about RI’s new ed commissioner

Magee, who earned his undergraduate degree from the College of the Holy Cross and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, has become one of the leading advocates for charter schools in Rhode Island over the last seven years.

He is best known for working with McKee to pass the 2008 legislation that created mayoral academies, which oversee several publicly funded charter schools and are governed by a board chaired by a municipal leader. The schools are allowed to operate independent of a traditional municipal teachers’ union contract.

Magee has also played a vital behind-the-scenes role in the annual State House battle over charter school legislation, lobbying lawmakers to avoid placing restrictions on RI Mayoral Academies leader tapped for national school reform gig | WPRI 12 Eyewitness News:

Good Soil: The overlooked aspect of school reform By Rod Paige | The Mississippi Link

Good Soil: The overlooked aspect of school reform | The Mississippi Link:

Good Soil: The overlooked aspect of school reform

“And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and  increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” – Mark 4:8, Holy Bible, English Standard Version

The importance of the home and community role in student learning has for years been shouted by a small but unwavering group of researchers and reform advocates.

But even so, the home and community role in student learning is still largely viewed as a marginal appendage to school based education reform efforts, rather than a significant aspect of overall student learning.

In an email to Jim Windham, president of the Texas Institute for Education Reform, surgeon Dr. Eric Chang-Tung expressed a view of the significance of home and community’s role in student learning which may offer a new way of viewing its significance.

In his email he wrote, “While successful education delivery is the goal, I personally believe that the substrate (individual student) is more of a problem than the delivery platform (teacher).”

Later in the same email, he continued, “I believe that a successful education requires both controlling the teaching platform but also addressing the substrate.” He goes on to write, “…there needs to be as much effort spent on the student substrate and environment as the teaching platform. This is missing from the current equation…”

While the term “substrate” is seldom found in education jargon, it is a fixture in the lexis of biochemistry, materials science and engineering, biology, chemistry, geology, and other scientific fields.

A search for definitions produces phrases such as: “the surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment, or “the earthly material in which an organism lives, or the surface or medium on which an organism grows or is attached.”

From a biological point of view, we can easily see the relevance of the term. For instance, it is widely understood that the quality of plants grown in one’s garden is significantly affected by the quality of the garden’s soil – the plant’s substrate.

A gardener knows well that plants grown in a poor environment with inadequate moisture, a deficiency of proper nutrients, and poorly cultivated soil, will not achieve the quality of production desired, no matter how carefully the gardener tends to the plants themselves.

For this reason, the gardener not only nurtures the plants by providing proper pruning, appropriate spacing, removal of weeds, and protection from pests, but also goes to great lengths to improve the soil in which the plants live, grow, or obtain their nourishment. In other words, the gardener cares both for the plants and their substrate.

Similarly, providing a high-quality education for students requires not only effective schools, great teaching, and parental choice, but also attention to the substrate in which students live and grow and from which they obtain their nourishment.

Achieving this nation’s public-school education goals will require attention to students’ school environment, but to their home and community environments as well.

The education literature is brimming with research and expert opinions supporting the concept that students’ home and community play a major role in their academic learning.

Research confirms that students are far more likely to be successful in school when their parents constantly express and exhibit the Good Soil: The overlooked aspect of school reform | The Mississippi Link:

GOP education summit: Six candidates meet with Campbell Brown in New Hampshire.

GOP education summit: Six candidates meet with Campbell Brown in New Hampshire.:

The Republican Primary Candidates’ Daylong School-Choice Lovefest

On Wednesday six GOP candidates for president—Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, and Chris Christie—sat on a stage in a Londonderry, New Hampshire, high school to talk K–12 education policy with former CNN anchor-turned-“education activist” Campbell Brown. The New Hampshire Education Summit, sponsored by the school choice advocacy organization theAmerican Federation for Children and hosted by Brown’s glossy new school-reform website, the Seventy Four (both, it is safe to say, are sympathetic to right-leaning education proposals currently in vogue), gave the six GOP candidates who showed up 45-plus minutes each to expound their views on K–12 education. The result was a daylong school-choice lovefest. Here’s what the candidates covered (hint: race, class, and poverty seldom made the cut).

Jeb Bush

The opening act was former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who was far more comfortable and commanding than at the Republican candidates debate last week. Bush, the (dubiously) self-proclaimed “education governor,” has well-known views on education, and he didn’t deviate from the formula much. He supports vouchers, which he claims didn’t “destroy public education—that’s a myth that was shattered by Florida,” and the general marketplace-driven competition of the charter movement: “The public schools have to get better or they close. This is America.”

When Brown veered to Common Core, Bush joked, “What’s that?” before coming out in veiled support of some form of state-derived standards (which are the same thing as the Common Core standards, since governors derived them). “We can’t keep dumbing down standards,” he said, then reminisced about his Spanish AP teacher at Andover who, in forcing him to read Cervantes and Borges his sophomore year, taught him that “high expectations matter.”

Bush also loves the “nerdy concept” of Title I portability that lets free- and reduced-meals students take their Title I dollars to the school of their choice. When asked about his pick for secretary of education, Bush gestured at his interviewer—a good indication of the tenor of hard-hitting conversation that Brown would be leading throughout the day. Bush also doubled down on his support for keeping the federal testing schedule in place and endorsed more federal money going to pay for privately run pre-K programs.

Carly Fiorina

Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, kicked it off with some niceGOP education summit: Six candidates meet with Campbell Brown in New Hampshire.:

Big Education Ape: AFT’s Weingarten on the Republican Education Forum | American Federation of Teachers http://bit.ly/1TXsbJ0

Big Education Ape: At N.H. forum, Christie again trains fire on teachers unions http://bit.ly/1TXksuC

Big Education Ape: “If I were King in America” attends a private/public NH EdSummit that refuses attendance to a pr... http://bit.ly/1TXoNha

Big Education Ape: RECAP: GOP New Hampshire Education Infomercial 2015 http://bit.ly/1J5tzEp

The Bright Students Left Behind - WSJ

The Bright Students Left Behind - WSJ:

The Bright Students Left Behind

While everyone focuses on boosting the weakest students, America’s smartest children are no longer being pushed to do their best

A great problem in U.S. education is that gifted students are rarely pushed to achieve their full potential. It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers. Among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose students took the PISA exams in 2012, the U.S. ranked 17th in reading, 20th in science and 27th in math.

Less well known is how few young Americans—particularly the poor and minorities—reach the top ranks on such measures. The PISA test breaks students into six levels of math literacy, and only 9% of American 15-year-olds reached the top two tiers. Compare that with 16% in Canada, 17% in Germany and 40% in Singapore.

Among the handful of American high achievers, only one in eight comes from the bottom socioeconomic quartile. In Canada it’s one in four; Germany one in six; and Singapore one in three.

What has gone wrong? Thanks to No Child Left Behind and its antecedents, U.S. education policy for decades has focused on boosting weak students to minimum proficiency while neglecting the children who have already cleared that low bar. When parents of “gifted” youngsters complained, they were accused of elitism. It is rich that today’s policies purport to advance equality, yet harm the smartest kids from disadvantaged circumstances.

High achievers were taken more seriously during the Sputnik era. The National Association for Gifted Children was founded in 1954, the same year as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. As the country concerned itself with educational equity, John W. Gardner, the president of the Carnegie Corporation (and future U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare), posed a provocative question in a seminal 1961 book with the title, “Excellence: Can we be equal and excellent too?”

The year 1983 brought “A Nation at Risk,” the celebrated report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which declared that poor schools were contributing to national weakness: “Our once unchallenged pre-eminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” Five years later Congress passed the sole federal program to focus specifically on gifted students, which intermittently provides a modest $9 million a year for them.

Poor test scores show that gifted American children still aren’t reaching the heights they are capable of. How do other nations achieve better results? We set out to examine 11 of them—four in Asia, four in Europe, and three that speak English—for our forthcoming book, “Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students.”

Unsurprisingly we found that culture, values and attitudes matter a great deal. Parents in Korea, Japan and Taiwan push their kids to excel, and often pay for outside tutors and The Bright Students Left Behind - WSJ:

What's behind the AFT's rush to endorse? | SocialistWorker.org

What's behind the AFT's rush to endorse? | SocialistWorker.org:

What's behind the AFT's rush to endorse?

New York City teacher Bill Linville, a UFT member and chapter leader at his Bronx high school, explains how the AFT's early presidential endorsement is stirring discontent.

LAST MONTH, with nearly 16 months to go until the 2016 presidential election and almost seven months before the start of party primaries, the Executive Council of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. This came even earlier than other recent AFT presidential endorsements--the union backed Clinton in October 2007 and didn't endorse Barack Obama for re-election until February 2012.

The early endorsement and the top-down process to arrive at it angered many AFT members and union activists. A petition calling on the union to rescind the endorsementgot 2,500 signatures within 24 hours.

There are various sources for the discontent among the rank and file. The most obvious is that the AFT leadership only went through the motions--if that--of getting input from members before tapping their favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, the clear choice of the Democratic establishment, over other contenders who are clearly more pro-labor.

But the debate within the union also goes to more basic questions about the AFT's relationship to a party that claims to defend unions and public education, but which has been as enthusiastic as the Republicans in pressing the corporate school "reform" agenda.

That reality--and the unanswered questions it poses for the AFT's political strategy--was thrown into sharp relief days after the union's endorsement was announced last month.

During debate in the Senate on legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)--essentially replacing No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Bush-era attack on public schools--the Democrats, along with their collaborator, Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, almost unanimously supported the Murphy Amendment, which would have kept the harshest punishments of the original law and mandated them on the federal level, instead of leaving these punishments up to the states, as the final version of the new law does. The amendment failed only because of Republican opposition.

Those are the kind of questions the union could be taking up as the 2016 election season gets underway, not anointing the Democratic frontrunner.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

AFT PRESIDENT Randi Weingarten sent an e-mail to AFT members which claimed that the union "conducted a phone survey calling more than 1 million members, commissioned a second major poll, and solicited your input online and in person." The AFT also What's behind the AFT's rush to endorse? | SocialistWorker.org: