WARNING : TRY TO KEEP UP WITH DIANE AT YOUR OWN RISK
Thursday, September 12, 2019
WARNING : TRY TO KEEP UP WITH DIANE AT YOUR OWN RISK: Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all
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 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
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
How The Post’s analysis compares to other studies of school segregation
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.
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)
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
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
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