Archive for the ‘School Advisory’ Category
Teachers rally around geography as proposal floated to replace the freshman course
January 25th, 2012
Saying too many freshmen are struggling, Oxnard Union High School District officials want to add a course to help students make the transition to their campuses.
But doing so has sparked debate about how to fit such a course into the curriculum. Initial plans have focused on replacing freshman geography, a course teachers say should not be eliminated.
“While some of our new freshmen do need help in making the transition to high school more effectively, eliminating an academic course is not the way to achieve such a goal,” said Ben Todd, a social science teacher who has taught geography at two of the district’s schools.
Geography covers all continents and the physical, cultural and political aspects of the subject, Todd said at a recent board meeting. “Geography gives teachers a venue to talk about cultural sensitivity and understanding the diversity of our world.”
District administrators said they find geography valuable and are a long way from deciding on the issue.
“What we’re looking at is trying to develop a course for our freshmen to take that would provide what we call 21st-century skills,” said Assistant Superintendent Bill Dabbs. Those skills include creativity, collaboration, technology and a background in how to prepare for college and careers — “a lot of issues in terms of the transition from the eighth grade to the ninth grade and what we can do to increase graduation rates, increase college-going rates.”
No one wants to lose the semester-long course in geography, Dabbs said, but the number of periods in the school day is limited.
“We want to make sure that the students have as much access to core academic learning as we can,” Dabbs said. “But at the same time, what do we do in terms of getting kids to see career pathways and those types of things? Is that really integrated into every class, or do we need a specific class for it?”
District officials said they are still in the first stages of the process and that a lot must be explored before they decide.
Once a proposal is made, it would have to go to the district’s curriculum council and the school board. Because geography is a graduation requirement in the district, the board also would have to decide whether to remove the requirement.
Teachers said they don’t think a class teaching freshman skills for high school should replace geography.
“I think we all acknowledge that there are different needs and some serious needs throughout this district for our freshmen,” said Josh Chancer, an instructional coach. “But does that mean that we take away a program? Is that going to solve that problem? I don’t think it is.”
He suggested having the transition skills taught in all freshmen classes, instead of one dedicated course.
“A lot of our kids, they’re not going on summer vacations around the world. They’re not taking those summer trips to Europe and to Asia and doing the wonderful things that we would all wish they could do,” Chancer said. “Geography is that opportunity for them to see the rest of the world, to get out of Oxnard and Ventura County.”
Tags: Course
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Torrance Education Foundation looks to fill funding gaps
January 18th, 2012
With state money evaporating, public schools are having to pass the hat around their local communities to avoid slipping into mediocrity, and with varying degrees of success.
In school districts like Manhattan Beach, Palos Verdes Peninsula and El Segundo, independent fundraising arms – typically referred to as education foundations – have effectively filled much of the gap. The Torrance Education Foundation has had a tougher time of it.
Now, in a bid to ramp up its fundraising capability, the Torrance Education Foundation is changing its approach, hiring its first-ever executive director, providing cash incentives for teachers and narrowing its focus to the math and science fields.
“We’re on the task of changing the way the ed foundation has been for the last 20 years,” said Tom Brewer, president of the Torrance organization. “We’re actually heading in a whole new direction starting this year.”
The success of local education foundations essentially reflects the affluence of the cities in which they operate.
In Manhattan Beach, for instance, the foundation last year generated $4.6 million, the vast majority of it from parent donations. That amounts to about 9 percent of the school district’s entire budget, or about $700 a student.
In the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the foundation last year brought in $2.5 million, or $210 per student. In Torrance, the foundation last school year raised about $350,000. That amounts to about $14 per student.
To be fair, comparing Torrance to those districts is not apples-to-apples. Torrance is more economically diverse than both of those communities, for starters. Also, the foundation in Torrance has to compete with other local fundraising entities.
One is the Torrance Chamber of Commerce. The group has ratcheted up its decades-old Adopt-a-School program, in which area businesses provide volunteers for myriad service projects. Last spring, the chamber celebrated 100 percent participation, meaning all 29 of Torrance’s public schools are now paired with a business partner.
More to the point, the Torrance school board last year relaxed restrictions on parent fundraisers, temporarily giving individual schools more freedom to bolster their own budgets. As a result, more school-based foundations have sprung up to raise money for certain kinds of employees, such as intervention specialists. That’s on top of PTA groups, which have traditionally raised money for equipment, not personnel.
Brewer said the increasing prevalence of the individual school foundations – often referred to as “alliances” – has complicated the foundation’s efforts to raise money.
“We’re losing steam to some of the different organizations,” he said. “To some extent they are going after some of the same sources of money that we’re going to go after. They go after parents and so do we. There are some schools that are actually going after businesses, which, that was the role of the ed foundation.”
Nonetheless, the Torrance foundation has set the bar high for next school year, pledging $500,000. That’s $150,000 beyond what it raised last year for the current school year.
So far, the foundation is less than halfway to its goal. But the hope is that an executive director will provide the continuity and focus necessary to boost revenues. As is, the Torrance foundation is the only organization of its kind in the South Bay without a full-time employee. That will change in the next month or two, when an executive director is hired, Brewer said.
The proliferation of school alliances also brings up issues of equity. Among the most successful schools in this regard is Anza Elementary School. The parent foundation there has been able to raise as much as $104,000 over three years. Other schools have raised nothing.
By contrast, the Torrance Education Foundation distributes money evenly among all schools. For instance, the foundation recently completed a massive effort to bring wireless capabilities to every school.
Beginning next fall, the foundation will focus its efforts primarily on programs having to do with science, technology, engineering and math – an area of study widely referred to as STEM.
“When you go to businesses, they want to know what the money is going to go for,” he said. “They don’t want it just to go into a dark hole.”
Another upcoming change centers on the foundation’s annual car raffle. On March 23, for the first time, the foundation will give away a brand-new Lexus. In years past, the grand prize has been a Toyota Prius.
This year, tickets will cost $30 instead of $20, with two-thirds of the proceeds being directed to the donor’s entity of choice for the current school year, and the final third being saved by the foundation for next school year. Five thousand tickets will be sold, meaning the effort will raise $150,000.
Also new this year is an incentive to get teachers to sell raffle tickets. Now, they will be able to receive what they sell, as opposed to having to write a grant and wait for another year.
“If the band wants uniforms or instruments or something, they can sell tickets and get the money right now,” he said. “If a teacher wants to have a party with it, they can. If they are looking to buy a computer or school supplies or something like that for their classroom, they’ll have the money to do it.”
Want to help?
To buy a raffle ticket from the Torrance Education Foundation, visit
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Moving Beyond Political Rhetoric in International Comparisons
January 8th, 2012
Making international comparisons about education systems was all the rage in 2011. Rhetoric suggested that America’s education system is performing so poorly that we as a nation have lost our competitive edge, and that the world’s emerging economies are out-educating us, which will result in the further decline of our nation.
I’m not sure if that rhetoric will stop in 2012, but it is time we move beyond it. How can we do that?
First off, in talking about our education system, we need to acknowledge that, as Dan Domenech (executive director of the American Association of School Administrators and chair of the Learning First Alliance Board of Directors) points out, it is actually the best that it has ever been. Graduation rates, college attendance rates and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are at their highest levels ever. Domenech also points out that when educators and education leaders travel internationally, they find that “overseas colleagues refer to our school system as the gold standard” and “parents in every corner of the world want to send their children to American schools.”
While it is important to remember that some public schools in America are not performing nearly as well as they should, it is equally important to remember that some are doing a phenomenal job, and that many in the international community still look to us as a leader in the education field.
Second, we need to be honest about what an incomplete or misleading picture educational data (be it performance, staffing, funding or any other subcategory of educational data) can paint. For example, federal officials have claimed that students in other countries – emerging economies like China and India as well as established high-performing nations like Korea and Japan – spend more time in class than American students. If you look at the number of days students spend in school, that may be true. But a recent review by the National School Board Association’s Center for Public Education shows that actually students in the U.S. receive around the same number of instructional hours as do many of their Asian counterpoints. [It also points out that U.S. students receive more instructional hours than a number of European nations, including high-flying Finland, and that there does not seem to be a relation to time in class and student performance.] The general point: We must move beyond simply citing figures in making international comparisons.
And third, in addition to observing the educational practices in high-performing countries, we need to actually implement the policies we admire so much.
As we all know, Finland is widely touted as a model for educational excellence. Yet as a recent article in The Atlantic points out, the educational policies that politicians in the U.S. have been favoring for the past decade-plus are nothing like what exists in Finland. What do I mean? Here is the U.S. we seem to have become dependent on standardized tests. But in Finland, there are no standardized tests (aside from a matriculation exam at the end of what is roughly the equivalent of American high school).
We talk a great deal about accountability. But there is no word for “accountability” in Finnish, according to Pasi Sahlberg director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility – “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”
We allow individuals with little training into our schools to teach our children. In Finland, one must have a master’s degree to enter the teaching profession. Teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the nation. Teachers have prestige, decent pay and a lot of responsibility.
And we spend a great deal of time debating issues of school choice – charter schools, private school vouchers, inter- and intradistrict choice. But in Finland, there are no private schools. The small number of independent schools are all publicly financed, and none can charge tuition. School choice is not a priority. As the article puts it, “the main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.”
As Sahlberg is quoted, “In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same.”
That is the heart of the lesson from Finland. But as the article’s title – What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success – points out, it is something we often ignore here in America.
The goal of the Finnish education program is not excellence, but equity. The idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn. Accomplishing equity ultimately led to excellence.
Critics often charge that what works in a nation like Finland won’t work here in the U.S. Finland is small, homogeneous nation – very unlike ours. And to be sure, we shouldn’t simply import what worked in Finland. We must adapt it to our context. Still, Finland’s size and diversity are comparable to that of some U.S. states. And we must only look to Norway, as Samuel Abrams (a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Teachers College) has done, to realize that being a small, relatively homogeneous nation does not guarantee excellent educational performance. Norway has mediocre performance on international assessments. The lesson there?
“Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country’s school system than the nation’s size or ethnic makeup.”
We need to force the conversation around international comparisons beyond political sound bites, publicly acknowledging the strengths of our own system and revisiting often-cited data to get a more accurate picture of the state of education around the world.
And we must be willing to apply what we learn to our own context. One possible starting place: Finland’s revelation that “The problem facing education…isn’t the ethnic diversity of the population, but the economic inequality of society. … More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.”
Food for thought as we ponder strategies for improving education in 2012.
Tags: International Comparisons, Rhetoric
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Heading Back to School
January 3rd, 2012
1. Motivation. It’s so easy to let school slide. If you’re tired or don’t feel well, school is one of the first things to go. And after time off, it’s really hard to get up the motivation to leap back in. I suggest (and I plan to) making the first couple of days back fun days. Pull out the crafts and the educational games. Ease back into the routine by padding the way with fun rather than diving right back in to all the workbooks. I think the teacher needs this just as much as the students.
2. Lapses in memory. When I was a homeschooled kid, we did year-round school because we forgot too much if we took the summer off. The same thing can happen if you just take a few days off – your children can forget skills and concepts they were learning just before the break. If you need to backtrack, no worries-just go back to where they feel comfortable and move forward from there. It’s not a race.
3. Keeping it positive. Sometimes when we’ve taken a break, we put pressure on ourselves to get back into the swing of things. We worry about how much time we’ve lost, and if our kids are reluctant, we might put too much negativity into the process. Homeschool is about finding joy with our children, and if we get too stressed about catching up, we’re missing the most crucial part of why we chose to homeschool in the first place.
Welcome back to school, and may it be fun and rewarding for you and your children!
Tags: School
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DC Agency: Single-Sex Dorms at Catholic U Don’t Violate Law
December 12th, 2011
The District of Columbia Office of Human Rights has held that John Garvey, president of Catholic University of America did not violate a District law banning sex discrimination by returning the institution he leads to single-sex dormitories. As I mentioned in a summer blog post, George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf filed a charge of discrimination against President Garvey.
The DC agency observed that laws banning discrimination on the basis of sex do not categorically forbid all sex-based distinctions. The DC Human Rights Act, the law under which Prof. Banzhaf sued, prohibits only those policies that are motivated by an invidious purpose, not policies that make distinctions between the sexes for benign purposes. Along the same lines, the agency stated that a policy that makes distinctions between men and women is valid so long as the policy is not motivated by discriminatory animus.
I must confess that I am slightly amused by the agencys use of this line of reasoning. When public universities accuse religious student groups of discriminating on the basis of religion by requiring their officers and leaders to share the groups religious commitments, my ADF colleagues and I typically first argue that what the religious group is doing is simply not discrimination which I would define as the invidious reliance upon irrelevant characteristics. When the schools Chess Club says no Hindus, thats discrimination; but when the schools Jewish Students Association says our leaders must be Jewish, its not. Despite the power of this common sense argument, it almost invariably fails when made by religious student groups at public universities. Thats why Im amused (and heartened) that the DC agency accepted a conceptually identical argument.
In any event, props to the DC Office of Human Rights for getting this one right and respecting religious freedom in the process.
Tags: Catholic U, Law
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