Public Education Network Weekly NewsBlast

PEN Weekly NewsBlast for August 17, 2007

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THERE IS NO CULTURE OF POVERTY
For too long, educators' approach to understanding the relationships between poverty, class and education has been framed by studying the behaviors and cultures of poor students and their families. So says Paul Gorski in "The Question of Class," a provocative article published in Teaching Tolerance magazine. If only we -- in the middle and upper-middle classes -- can understand their culture, why those people don't value education, why those parents don't attend our functions and meetings, why those kids are so unmotivated, perhaps we can "save" some of our economically disadvantaged students from bleak futures. And so we set about studying what Ruby Payne and others describe as the "culture of poverty," how poor people see and experience the world, how they relate to food, money, relationships, education and other aspects of life. This, despite the fact that research has shown again and again that no such culture of poverty exists. It's all too easy, for even the most well-meaning of us, to help perpetuate classism by buying into that mindset, implementing activities and strategies for "working with parents in poverty" or "teaching students in poverty" that, however subtly, suggest we must fix poor people instead of eliminating the inequities that oppress poor people. The question, of course, for any educator of privilege committed to educational equity is this: Do we choose to study supposed cultures or mindsets of poverty because doing so doesn't require an examination of our own class-based prejudices? By avoiding that question, we also avoid the messy, painful work of analyzing how classism pervades our classrooms and schools, never moving forward toward an authentic understanding of poverty, class and education. We should never, under any circumstance, make an assumption about a student or parent -- about their values or culture or mindset -- based on a single dimension of their identity. There is no more a single culture of poverty than there is a single culture of woman-ness or of African American-ness.

FORCED TO PICK A MAJOR IN HIGH SCHOOL
Ninth graders often have trouble selecting what clothes to wear to school each morning or what to have for lunch. But starting this fall, freshmen at Dwight Morrow High School in Bergen County, N.J., must declare a major that will determine what electives they take for four years and be noted on their diplomas. For Dwight Morrow, a school that has struggled with low test scores and racial tensions for years, establishing majors is a way to make their students stay interested until graduation and stand out in the hypercompetitive college admissions process. Some parents have welcomed the requirement, noting that a magnet school in the district already allowed some students to specialize, reports Winnie Hu in the New York Times. But other parents and some educators have criticized it as pre-professionalism run amok or a marketing gimmick. Debra Humphreys, a spokesperson for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, called high school majors "a colossally bad idea," saying youngsters should instead concentrate on developing a broad range of critical thinking and communication skills. "Today’s economy requires people to be constantly learning and changing," Ms. Humphreys said. "A lot of jobs that high school students are likely to have 10 years from now don't yet exist, so preparing too narrowly will not serve them well."

THE PROMISE OF EXTENDED LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES & SUPPORTS FOR YOUTH
There is a growing realization that reaching our goal of ensuring that all young people can graduate from any public high school with competitive, marketable skills will require high quality educational opportunities both during and beyond the school day. The inequities in educational opportunities in schools have been well documented. But the significant gaps within school-day learning opportunities tell only part of the story. There are larger gaps outside the proverbial schoolhouse in the kinds of supplemental services that are essential for young people to develop the "capital" needed to succeed. High-functioning extended learning activities should promote socially and academically nurturing environments while maintaining the interest and norms of students from diverse cultures. Access to high quality enrichment activities can narrow the opportunity and achievement gaps by helping students develop a variety of necessary competencies to transition into adulthood and awareness of the larger world around them. These competencies include not only academic abilities; they also include social competencies that enable young people to succeed in the workforce and society, write Heidi Harris Lemmel and Robert Rothman in the new issue of Voices in Urban Education. What would a high-functioning system look like that provided equitable opportunities and that integrated in-school and extended learning? The essays at the link below show that creating meaningful opportunities involves a deliberate effort to link schools with community organizations and agencies. Such partnerships are new in many cities. Fortunately, municipal leaders, educators, and community groups appear eager to develop such partnerships and work together to build systems that support student learning in and out of school. Such efforts are essential if young people are to grow and develop to become engaged citizens and productive adults. But the efforts also recognize, as Mayor Cicilline puts it, that communities have a responsibility for the healthy development of young people. It's time we all took that responsibility seriously.

ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT
Environmental issues like global warming and pollution are hot topics in the media, the halls of Congress, and at water coolers everywhere. But, in schools, students are hearing less and less about these issues. Why? The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), enacted in 2002, forces schools to curtail or abandon environmental education. At the same time, the amount of federal funding for environmental education has dwindled. Interest in environmental education has steadily increased for three decades, but investment in these programs came to a screeching halt when NCLB was enacted in 2002. In 2007, voters, educators, and parents have a golden opportunity to bring environmental education back to the forefront of classrooms nationwide. NCLB expires this year and must be re-authorized by Congress. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, North American Association for Environmental Education, Center for Environmental Literacy, and others are working to change NCLB and increase funding for environmental education in America's schools. NCLB was enacted to give teachers greater authority and flexibility in exchange for more accountability. However, the law places overwhelming emphasis on reading and math and requires stringent testing on these two subjects. This forces many schools to abandon environmental education programs so they can invest more time and money in math and language arts. To learn more, visit the above link.

HISTORIAN ADVISES LAWMAKERS ON SCHOOL
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough told the nation’s state legislators that schools need to do a better job of educating American students about significant past events and personalities. The bestselling author warned that students in this country are growing up historically illiterate. A key to solving that problem is to make sure teachers are better prepared for the classroom, reports Eric Kelderman for Stateline.org. "We've got to get over this idea that teachers are sort of glorified babysitters who take care of our children or our grandchildren while we're doing the important work. They are doing the important work. And we've got to do a much better job of teaching our teachers," McCullough said. He praised colleges that require future teachers to have a subject major outside of education. "For a young person to go into teaching and graduate with a degree in education and no major of the usual kind is to send that person into the classroom with an enormous handicap, which will be passed on to students," he said. On top of that, higher education in general should set more specific course standards, he urged. "Of the 50 supposedly best colleges and universities in the country, at very few of them is history required for graduation. In many cases, no foreign language is required nor is any science required and yet we say to these people on commencement day that they are educated. Who are we kidding?" McCullough also said many textbooks are so "dreary and boring" that they seemed to have been written with the intention of killing interest in history. The popular Harry Potter series of books proves that younger children are capable of digesting complex information on any topic if it is presented as an interesting story, he said. "If I were in your role, if I had a chance to direct where money would be applied to improve the situation of the teaching of history in our schools, I would concentrate on grade school -- third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade -- because that’s the time that they want to know," he said. "At that age … it’s not yet cool to be dumb and they're not afraid to ask what might be taken as a dumb question," McCullough said.

AN OUTRAGEOUS CAT TEACHES A NEW GENERATION TO READ
Greece had Zeus. America has Seuss. In the 50 years since "The Cat in the Hat" exploded onto the children's book scene, Theodor Seuss Geisel -- pen name "Dr. Seuss" -- has become a central character in the American literary mythology, sharing the pantheon with the likes of Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Of his many imaginative stories, "The Cat in the Hat" remains the most iconic. The tale, writes Chris Wilson in U.S. News & World Report, is about the irreverent cat who waltzes uninvited into a house where two children have been left alone for the day and proceeds to violate every tenet of their mother's commandments. It came at a time when children's literature was largely dominated by Aesop's fables and other stories with explicit morals -- lessons that the cat flouts with zeal. "It was extremely radical when it came out," says Eliza Dresang of Florida State University, who studies children's literature. The particular endurance of Cat, many critics say, is owed partly to its origins in an emerging philosophy of phonetic learning. Most of the 236 individual words in the book were taken from a list of beginner words for new readers, and only a few are more than one syllable. The "anapestic" meter -- two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable -- marks out a cadence that is easy for young readers to grasp. Using this model, Geisel and partners would go on to found a whole series called Beginner Books. "When you're reading aloud, you can just feel what's supposed to come next," says Joyce Herbeck, an education professor at Montana State University. "It makes them feel like readers right away."

TITLE I FUNDS: WHO’S GAINING? WHO’S LOSING?
With Title I funding streams remaining essentially flat over the last two years, a majority of states appear unable to reserve the full amount of funds required for school improvement efforts under the No Child Left Behind Act, according to a report from the independent, Washington, D.C.-based Center on Education Policy. The report, which analyzes 2007-08 Title I, Part A allocations from the U.S. Department of Education, also finds that the level of Title I funding received by some states and school districts is extremely volatile, due to updated calculations made each year under the law’s funding formulas. The report highlights the impact of annual poverty count updates on the distribution of funds and discusses the mandatory state reservation of funds for school improvement activities.

SCHOOLS ADVISED TO NARROW FOCUS TO CRUCIAL LESSONS
Oregon should stop asking schools to teach a laundry list of facts and skills in every subject and instead encourage teachers to focus on crucial lessons with lasting value, a new study recommends. WestEd, a nonprofit research center that specializes in state academic standards and tests, spent nine months examining Oregon's academic standards for every subject and grade plus every question on state tests. The state paid WestEd $350,000 to find weaknesses in its tests and standards and recommend fixes. In its final report, the think tank concluded Oregon should join a new national movement toward "less is more" in curriculum mandates. The state should direct schools, teachers and students toward the most important content for students to master, rather than requiring schools to cover the waterfront, the study recommends. Oregon's current approach to teaching and testing, for instance, calls on fourth-grade teachers to instill 105 new reading and writing skills, including 47 covered on state tests. Those range from "determine the meaning of words from context and structural clues" to "correctly write possessive plural nouns." Nothing signals teachers which of the myriad skills it is most essential for students to learn well, reports Betsy Hammond for The Oregonian. That approach is why U.S. schools have been criticized for a curriculum that is a mile wide but an inch deep, particularly compared to other nations' approach to teaching math and science, said Stanley Rabinowitz, lead author of the WestEd study. It is easy for state curriculum committees to make a long list of what teachers should cover each year, Rabinowitz said. It takes a lot more thought and debate to decide what content is most important -- and Oregon should think carefully about which people get to help make that call, he said. Oregonians, including teachers, employers, parents, college officials and principals, should be at the table, he said.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE: THE MISSING PIECE OF A WELL-ROUNDED EDUCATION
Michael Pritchard is a healer, and a pioneer in the field of social-emotional learning (SEL), the often-neglected missing piece in a well-rounded education. For the past two decades, he has been touring the country, talking and listening to students, teachers, and parents. He has written two books and produced a series of award-winning videos that focus on the critical issues of character and emotional intelligence for middle and high school students. "What I try to teach kids is that we have to be more real about our emotions," explains Pritchard. "Shakespeare said, 'Always give sorrow words. Grief that does not speak whispers to the over-fraught heart and bids it to break.' I'm teaching kids that tears that do not flow will make other organs weep inside us. We get sick if we try to hold all that pain in. And then, the unaddressed grief turns to anger, and the anger to rage. And it has two directions -- out to the community, or inward toward the self, and self-destructiveness." For years, most mainstream educators have marginalized Pritchard and other SEL advocates. Now, their pleas for others who work with youths to "get real" about students' emotions are finally being heard. Late last year, the Illinois State Board of Education distributed the state's new Social and Emotional Learning Standards for K-12 students. Just as standards in language arts and math, for example, require students to achieve certain benchmarks, the SEL guidelines hold them accountable for proficiency in self-awareness, social awareness, and decision making. For Maurice Elias, author of "Raising Emotionally Intelligent Teenagers and Emotionally Intelligent Parenting", this is one school reform effort that just might work. "When you look at the literature on education reform, it's replete with failure," says Elias. "We've been treating students as if they're not people -- as if they're somehow sponges, and not human beings that come in with their emotions in full play."I don't know of anybody that can learn in the absence of a positive relationship," he adds. "We learn from the people we care about. And yet we somehow pretend that in school, it doesn't matter. So, those who are actually concerned about academics should be concerned about social and emotional learning as well." Numerous studies link emotional well-being to academic success, and stress to failure, writes Ken Ellis in Edutopia. For Pritchard, teaching SEL is a no-brainer. "I say to the principals, 'No matter what we teach kids, love is more important than any knowledge we give them.' Because they can't become the gift that they're supposed to become if they're disconnected from their heart."

FOR-PROFIT EDUCATION COMPANIES TAKE PUBLIC MONEY, PROVIDE LITTLE INFORMATION
"Profiles of For-Profit Education Management Organizations: 2006-2007" released by the Arizona State University Commercialism in Education and Education Policy Research Units finds that, despite repeated requests, several large publicly funded Education Management Organizations (EMOs) failed to provide information about their schools or finances when queried by researchers. The data collected in the report suggest that the number of charter schools overall has increased and the number of EMO-run charter schools has stabilized or declined slightly. The number of students enrolled in charter schools has shown a slight decrease. Large-size Education Management Organizations appear to have increased the percentage of charter school students educated in their schools. EMO enrollments are heavily concentrated in the primary grades and EMO-run charter primary schools are likely to be larger than the national average enrollment for charter primary schools. The report finds that:

Professor Alex Molnar, a co-author of the report, suggests that policy makers take a close look at the business models as well as the education models of EMOs: "For-profit firms are cashing checks worth a lot of taxpayer dollars. They do so while withholding as much information as possible from the public. This does not seem like a situation likely to benefit taxpayers and school children either financially or educationally."

HOW NCLB ALLOWS STATE TO SET THE BAR TOO LOW FOR IMPROVING HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION RATES
Despite the national focus on reforming America’s high schools, most states are setting woefully low goals for improving graduation rates and are not setting goals for ensuring that more low-income, minority, disabled and English language learner students graduate, according to a new report released by The Education Trust. "Graduation Matters: Improving Accountability for High School Graduation" documents state-set goals for graduation rates under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, showing how improvement targets are often so low that they undercut the aim of significantly raising graduation rates. "One in four students who start ninth grade will not earn a diploma four years later, and the picture is even worse for low-income students and students of color," said Daria Hall, Assistant Director for K-12 Policy at The Education Trust, and the report’s author. "Because current graduation rates are so low, we need targets that provoke action on behalf of students, not ones that condone the status quo." Under the NCLB accountability provisions known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), U.S. high schools must meet state goals for educating all students in reading and math as well as graduating them on time. While the AYP provisions are explicit about procedures for setting proficiency targets in math and reading, the discretion the law gives states in setting graduation-rate goals and improvement targets has resulted in a wide range of expectations, as demonstrated in the report.

TEENS & ‘TWEENS ARE CREATING CONTENT & CONNECTING ONLINE FOR EDUCATIONAL BENEFITS
A new study by the National School Boards Association and Grunwald Associates LLC exploring the online behaviors of U.S. teens and ‘tweens shows that 96 percent of students with online access use social networking technologies, such as chatting, text messaging, blogging, and visiting online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and Webkinz. Further, students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork. "There is no doubt that these online teen hangouts are having a huge influence on how kids today are creatively thinking and behaving," said Anne L. Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association. "The challenge for school boards and educators is that they have to keep pace with how students are using these tools in positive ways and consider how they might incorporate this technology into the school setting." Today, students report that they are spending almost as much time using social networking services and websites as they spend watching television. Among teens who use social networking sites, that amounts to about 9 hours a week online, compared to 10 hours a week watching television.

EDUCATORS WANTED TO PILOT NEW TEACH UNICEF CURRICULUM
In an attempt to bring a greater global perspective to US classrooms, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF is looking to partner with U.S. teachers this fall, to pilot its new "TeachUNICEF" educational materials for grades 6-8 and 9-12. These unique lesson plans are based on UNICEF's 2006 "State of the World's Children Report". They examine how issues of poverty, armed conflict, child labor and disability impact the lives of children in developing countries, and what UNICEF is doing to overcome these challenges to children's survival and development. Teachers will be asked to choose two lesson plans to present to their class, which are downloadable off of the TeachUNICEF website. Following the pilot program, teachers will be requested to complete a short online survey form in order to provide feedback on the materials. The U.S. Fund for UNICEF is pilot testing this TeachUNICEF series. If you are a middle school or high school teacher interested in providing feedback for the pilot, please contact us at TeachUNICEF@unicefusa.org. 

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QUOTES OF THE WEEK
"The importance of education is not just practical: a well-educated, enlightened and active mind, able to wander freely and widely, is one of the joys and rewards of human existence."

 - United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

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