Teach the Kids- The Parents will follow

Teach the Kids, and the Parents Will Follow

 

Like most principals, Dave Levin believed that parental support was essential to a school’s success. So when many families pulled their kids out of his struggling South Bronx charter school after its first year, he thought he was in trouble.

Some parents called him and his teaching partner, Frank Corcoran, “crazy white boys.” The two had recruited 46 fifth-graders, barely enough to start the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Academy, and 12 failed to return for sixth grade. Test scores were somewhat better than at other local schools, but Levin’s discipline methods weren’t working. By March of his second year he believed that he had no choice but to close the school.

That was 1997. Twelve years later, the academy, saved by a last-minute change of mind, is considered a great success and a model for the 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District. Together, they have produced the largest achievement gains for impoverished children ever seen in a single school network.

And Levin did it, in the beginning, with very mixed reviews from parents. The story of his school and others like it suggests that the importance of parental involvement, at least in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, has been exaggerated, probably because middle-class commentators have been imposing their suburban experiences on very different situations. Unchallenged, this misunderstanding of what works for low-income children could stymie efforts to improve the country’s worst schools.

The best school leaders say that they don’t need much parental involvement when they are hiring staff, creating class schedules and putting discipline procedures in place. Take Susan Schaeffler, the founder of the cluster of KIPP schools in Washington. She had no track record and zero name identification when she and her staff started teaching fifth grade in an Anacostia church basement. She recruited students by standing in front of markets and shouting: “See me if you are interested in a school that will keep your child from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon!” That promise of free child care is what persuaded many parents to give her a try. Much time passed before she was able to prove that her teachers could produce the highest test scores of any public school in the city.

Perhaps the best teacher I ever met, Jaime Escalante at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, was mostly ignored despite his early success. He had to extort parental action with a telephone voice that made him sound, his mostly Hispanic students insisted, like a village priest back in Mexico. If a student missed two days of his math class, he would call the parents and threaten to notify the immigration authorities or whoever he thought might motivate them if he did not see their child the next day. Only years later, after a movie made him famous, did parents decide that Escalante could do no wrong.

Low-income parents may often be distracted just trying to make a living, but they know what works. Once they see a school keeping its promises, they provide the kind of support found in suburban schools. But it’s important to remember that good schooling must come before parental support, not the other way around.

In 2006, when Sharron Hall enrolled three sons in KIPP’s KEY Academy in Southeast Washington, she wasn’t sure that it was the right move. At first she found it difficult to attend the meetings teachers called when her fifth-grader, Jaquan, failed to complete his homework. The school was on a commercial strip where parking was scarce. But this year, her third as a KIPP parent, she is backing every move the teachers make. She was particularly pleased when they decided to have Jaquan, who is younger than most of his classmates, repeat sixth grade. Years before, when she’d asked another charter school to hold back a daughter who couldn’t subtract 32 from 58, the teachers had laughed off her request.

Some parents, including those in Atlanta and in Fresno, Calif., who recently lodged complaints that KIPP teachers had punished their children excessively, say that the academies sometimes run roughshod over them. KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg seemed to cross the line several years ago when he told a Houston mother that he would expel her TV-addicted fifth-grader unless she allowed him to remove the family’s television set from their apartment. But the mother went along with the plan, and the TV sat in the girl’s school homeroom until her steady improvement convinced Feinberg that he had broken the one-eyed monster’s grip.

Levin said he always listened to parents. But it wasn’t his conversations with them that won them over. It was what they found at the school, which even converted some former critics. He hired veteran public school teachers to help him improve discipline and start an all-school orchestra. Each year, test scores improved, until the KIPP Academy became the highest-performing middle school in the Bronx even though its student body was 86 percent low-income.

Levin saw how strongly parents felt about the academy when administrators and parents from P.S. 31, the regular school housed in the same building, petitioned the local school board to move KIPP elsewhere. When the board convened, only a handful of P.S. 31 supporters showed up, but more than 200 KIPP parents were there to cheer for their children’s school.

When the agenda item was announced, the crowd began to chant, “KIPP, KIPP, KIPP . . . .” The district superintendent pleaded for quiet, but the chanting continued until Levin took the microphone. He thanked everyone for coming and said how pleased he was to see parents so involved. The meeting soon ended, KIPP’s expulsion no longer an issue.

Such moments have led Levin and many other principals to conclude that they should both listen to parents and do what they know is best, confident that when children succeed, their gratified families will be with them all the way.

mathewsj@washpost.com

 

Jay Mathews is the education columnist for The Post and the author of a new book about the KIPP schools, “Work Hard. Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.”

Sexualization of Children

Sexy videos like the one above are part of the normal video  buffet for children. Children who look at these images and listen to these songs repeatedly beginning at an early age are more likely to engage in sexual practices at an early age.

These images are the reason why some schools have cancelled a lot of school dances. The administrators are wary about having school dances because the dances look like they are having vertical sex.

I have seen children at the age of three or four encouraged to act sexy and dance in sexy ways. The parents feel that this behavior is cute at this age because the children are so young and innocent. What they do not realize is that these children evolve, and when they evolve into middle school aged children who are uncontrollable, they want to call the police.

Why our schools are failing our children

I heard that cold truth again this week. It was reiterated by a former teacher. Not one of mine, but a woman who had worked with enough students in her decades of secondary school teaching to make the claim with some authority.

I’ll concede the point and up the ante. Not everyone is high school material, either – at least, as high schools are currently constituted.

Sounds demeaning, right? It’s a tad impolite to say in public that large swaths of the general population just don’t have the chops to earn even a high school degree. But if graduation rates are used as the measure of high school success, the evidence is mounting.

Nearly one-third of all students fail to earn a high school diploma in the typical four-year period. And graduation rates are significantly lower among poorer black and Latino students. Less than half of all black students and less than 60 percent of Latinos earn a regular high school diploma.

To some, this might confirm the “Bell Curve” explanation – i.e., that the problem is a racial or class pathology. Before we head down that ugly path of blaming, consider this:

The dirty little secret is that we don’t know for sure how many students are dropping out of school, because the numbers can be massaged and fudged by educational authorities. New legislation is pending that would standardize how graduation rates are reported, which is necessary for establishing credible standards. Coupled with changes ordered by the Department of Education last fall, states will be doing a far better job at calculating the data. But be prepared: The new standards may reveal the dropout situation to be worse than we thought.

An inordinate amount of political will is being exerted to grade a school system that is obviously failing too many students, with the grand hope that scrutiny will yield vastly different results. Instead of concluding that the dropout rates are a result of socioeconomic disparities and that these kids are unable to acquire skills and a useful education, maybe it’s time to ask whether the some of the problem is in how high schools are structured. Maybe the answer is different models for secondary instruction, including more options that move youth faster into either traditional four-year college, online courses or training programs – whatever fits for their abilities and goals.

Let’s not kid ourselves. The main purpose of providing free public education is to strengthen the nation, preparing today’s high school grad to become a productive citizen. Yes, it would be nice if every graduate were able to relish a good novel, but we all need to enjoy the economic value they add in taxes, productivity.

By one estimate, the dropouts of 2008 alone will cost the nation more than $319 billion in lost wages throughout their lifetimes.

What’s at stake here is nothing less than the future prosperity of this nation. The graduation rate has remained fairly static at about 70 percent for decades, according to U.S. Department of Education. In other words, the failure of our education model has been apparent for a long time, yet nothing we’ve tried has had any appreciable success at fixing the problem.

I’ve always been bothered when people casually remark that “not everyone is college material.” I just can’t shake the suspicion that some kids initially get plopped into that category not by their own lack of merit, but rather by the low expectations for how far they will climb up the educational ladder. Self-fulfilling prophecy usually handles the rest.

But to extend the philosophy of “not everyone is…” to the high school level? Well, I’m not willing to go that far. No one should. If our high schools are failing to reach one-third or more of the nation’s youth in a meaningful way, we owe it to our youth to ask how our schools are failing them.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.

The culture of Poverty

 

How to understand a culture of poverty

By Sudhir Venkatesh, Slate

Published Wednesday, March 18, 2009

http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/article985134.ece#

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Pop quiz: Who made the following observation? “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of (black America) is the deterioration of the (black) family. It is a fundamental weakness of (black Americans) at the present time.”

Each year, I pose this question to my undergraduate students. Most will guess George Bush, Bill Cosby, Al Sharpton or Bill Clinton. This is not surprising, given their age.

More telling is their perception that such a view might come from the political left or right. It reveals just how commonplace the link of family-race-poverty is in the American mind-set.

But there is a little trickery going on: Replace “black” with “Negro” and change the date to 1965. The correct author is Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He wrote these words as part of a policy brief to help President Lyndon Johnson understand the distressed social conditions in urban ghettos. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” leaked to the press and created a firestorm of controversy with its contention that a “tangle of pathology” engulfed black America.

The so-called “Moynihan Report” brought about a new language for understanding race and poverty: Now-familiar terms like pathology, blame the victim, and culture of poverty entered American thought as people debated whether Moynihan was courageously pointing out the causes of social ills or simply finger-pointing. Moynihan forced a nation to ask, “Is the culture of poor blacks at the core of their problems?”

A deep American schism was born. Liberals believed that black poverty was caused by systemic racism, such as workplace discrimination and residential segregation, and that focusing on the family was a form of “blaming the victim.” Conservatives pointed to individual failure to embrace mainstream cultural values like hard work and sobriety, and intact (read: nuclear) families.

In this standoff, along comes the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson, whom I studied with at the University of Chicago in the 1990s. Wilson claims his analysis in his new book will bridge the two worlds and create a new, more enlightened way for Americans to talk about race — but he is well aware that won’t happen without controversy.

It is fitting that the most famous contemporary sociologist has decided to address the most significant policy issue of our time. Anything but shy, Wilson has devoted his career to wading into contentious debates that have enormous social implications for the way we understand race and inequality in America.

In More Than Just Race Wilson wants to explain inner-city behavior — such as young black males’ disdain for low-wage jobs, their use of violence, and their refusal to take responsibility for children — without pointing simplistically to discrimination or a deficit in values. Instead, he argues that years of exposure to similar situations can create responses that look as if they express individual will or active preference when they are, in fact, adaptations or resigned responses to racial exclusion.

Consider a young man who works in the drug economy. That doesn’t mean he places little, if any, value on legitimate work. Employment opportunities are limited in the man’s segregated neighborhood. Most of the good jobs are far away. To complicate matters, many of his friends and neighbors are probably connected to the drug trade. Survival and peer pressure dictate that the man will seek out the dangerous, illegal jobs that are nearby, even while he may prefer a stable, mainstream job. Delinquent behavior? Certainly, but more than likely a comprehensible response to lack of opportunity.

Now focus Wilson’s “socialization” lens on teen pregnancy: Young inner-city women achieve both personal identity and social validation in their community by entering into motherhood. They join others whose lives are similarly defined by early parenting.

Wilson does more than argue for the rationality of such behaviors. The actions of both the young man and the teenage mother are “cultural,” he suggests, because they follow from the individual’s perceptions of how society works. These perceptions are learned over time, and they create powerful expectations that can lead individuals to act in ways that, to the outside world, suggest insolence, laziness, pathology, etc.

Wilson describes this succinctly: “Parents in segregated communities who have had experiences (with discrimination and disrespect) may transmit to children, through the process of socialization, a set of beliefs about what to expect from life and how one should respond to circumstances. … Children may acquire a disposition to interpret the way the world works that reflects a strong sense that other members of society disrespect them because they are black.”

If you think you’re at a disadvantage (however justified or unjustified that belief may be), you internalize your status, such that your low expectations become as durable an obstacle as the discrimination you might be facing.

Wilson appreciates Moynihan for shedding light on ghetto poverty. But by focusing on the capacity of the poor to act rationally and thoughtfully, Wilson wants us to move past victimhood. In his view, neither defending the victim nor blaming the victim is very helpful in moving us forward.

Three generations of black ghetto dwellers have been relying on welfare and sporadic work and doing so in isolation from the mainstream. It is folly to believe that some distinctive behavior, values, or outlooks have not arisen as a consequence. In Wilson’s work, the recognition functions almost like confession: Let us face the truth, so that we may finally bring forth change.

The book stands to have a powerful impact in policy circles because it points to the elephant in the room. Wilson emphasizes the advantages of “race neutral” jobs programs, knowing that Americans are more likely to support initiatives that are not identified with poor blacks. Stated somewhat crudely, increasing employment will reduce the number of people who might promote or even condone deviant behavior.

Because Wilson advised the Obama campaign, it is likely that his combination of race-neutral social policies and “jobs-first” agenda will be attractive to our president.

Sudhir Venkatesh is William B. Ransford professor of sociology at Columbia University and author of Gang Leader for a Day.

Boys and Girls Together, Taught Separately

March 11, 2009 Boys and Girls Together, Taught Separately in Public School By JENNIFER MEDINA Michael Napolitano speaks to his fifth-grade class in the Morrisania section of the Bronx like a basketball coach. “You — let me see you trying!” he insisted the other day during a math lesson. “Come on, faster!” Across the hall, Larita Hudson’s scolding is more like a therapist’s. “This is so sloppy, honey,” she prodded as she reviewed problems in a workbook. “Remember what I spoke to you about? About being the bright shining star that you are?” They are not just two teachers with different personalities. Ms. Hudson, who is 32 and grew up near the school, has a room full of 11-year-old girls, while Mr. Napolitano, a 50-year-old former special education teacher, faces 23 boys. A third fifth-grade class down the hall is co-ed. The single-sex classes at Public School 140, which started as an experiment last year to address sagging test scores and behavioral problems, are among at least 445 such classrooms nationwide, according to the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education. Most have sprouted since a 2004 federal regulatory change that gave public schools freedom to separate girls and boys. The nation’s 95 single-sex public schools — including a dozen in New York City — while deemed legal, still have many critics. But separation by a hallway is generally more socially and politically palatable. And unlike other programs aimed at improving student performance, there is no extra cost. “We will do whatever works, however we can get there,” said Paul Cannon, principal of P.S. 140, which is also known as the Eagle School. “We thought this would be another tool to try.” Over the years, Mr. Cannon had experimented with after-school tutoring, playing sports with students and their fathers on weekends, and creating welcoming science and computer labs. Test scores improved enough to remove P.S. 140 from the state’s list of struggling schools, but Mr. Cannon noticed that fifth graders’ results were largely stagnant, a slump common across the city. He heard about a school in North Carolina that had all-girls classes and was inspired. So he decided to try it — under the Bloomberg administration’s philosophy of letting principals run their schools as they wish, it was as simple as that, with no special training or monitoring. A few parents expressed reservations at first, but it was popular enough that this year, the middle school around the corner followed suit with its sixth grade. “Before it was all about showing the girls who was toughest, and roughing up and being cool,” said Samell Little, whose son Gavin is in his second school year surrounded only by boys. “Now I never hear a word from teachers about behavior problems, and when he talks about school, he is actually talking about work.” But Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said separate classrooms reinforce gender stereotypes. “A boy who has never been beaten by a girl on an algebra test could have some major problems having a female supervisor,” she said. While some advocates believe that girls are more likely to participate in class when no boys are present — and that boys, particularly those from low-income families, tend to focus better without girls around — academic research is inconclusive. “The question always must be: What are you trying to accomplish with separating the students and how will you do it?” said Rosemary C. Salamone, a law professor at St. John’s University and author of “Same, Different, Equal: Rethinking Single-Sex Schooling.” She added, “If you don’t do it thoughtfully, you run the risk of reinforcing stereotypes and playing to students’ weaknesses.” In California, a high-profile governor’s initiative that split six middle schools and high schools into single-sex academies in the late 1990s ended after a few years, and few students showed sizable improvement. At the Bronx’s Eagle School, there is also little evidence so far of improvement, at least of the easy-to-measure variety. Students of both sexes in the co-ed fifth grade did better on last year’s state tests in math and English than their counterparts in the single-sex rooms, and this year’s co-ed class had the highest percentage of students passing the state social studies exam. But these numbers are as much a reflection of who is in which room. In general, struggling students are steered toward the single-sex classes (anyone who objects can opt out). While test scores might not show it, Mr. Cannon and his teachers said there have been fewer fights and discipline issues, and more participation in class and after-school activities, since the girls and boys were split up. Mr. Napolitano, one of four men among the school’s 30 classroom teachers, said he thinks of his students as “23 sort-of sons,” and engages them with Marvel Comics and chess. He proudly held up the book “Patrol Boy,” with a picture of a young man with a large tattoo on his back, as an example of material he would not have used in a co-ed class. “There’s an aspect of male bonding, a closeness that we wouldn’t otherwise have,” he said. “I feel more like I am teaching them about right from wrong than I might have normally.” And he said he can “be a little more stern” with his students now. “If I get in the face of a girl, she would just cry,” he said. “The boys respond to it, they know it’s part of being a young man.” Indeed, when asked the best part of being in an all-boys class, Jorge Jimenez, 11, responded confidently, “I am learning how to be a man.” Asked to explain himself, he announced, “To learn how to put on deodorant.” (A few days earlier Mr. Napolitano had handed out small bags of soap and deodorant samples as part of a brief lesson in body odor.) There is a sisterhood equivalent in the girls’ classroom, where a recent assignment was to research influential black women (several wanted to interview Ms. Hudson, but she directed them to the Internet for higher-profile subjects like Harriet Tubman and Michelle Obama). Ms. Hudson often has the students work in small groups, which she said fosters both independence and a sense of community. And, as Guadalupe Bravo, 11, put it, “drama.” Take the recent afternoon when the students were making posters on the Revolutionary War. As the class broke into two-person teams, one girl was left on her own, her face buried in her hands. Ms. Hudson approached the two students at the next desk. “You notice that someone is on their own without a group and you don’t do anything about it?” she asked, mindful of lingering feelings of some perceived slight. “I am surprised at you, really. If someone apologizes, you try to forget about it and move on.” Moments later, the three girls were trading markers and debating what words best described the frustration of the revolutionaries. “Even when there is an argument brewing, they can get past it,” Ms. Hudson said. “The truth is, that’s an important skill, too.”

DPS Official: Parents could be an obstacle to reform

DPS official: Teachers, parents could be obstacle to reform

BY TODD SPANGLER
FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF

WASHINGTON — Detroit’s school board president took to heart U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s message Monday that additional funding could slow to a trickle if stimulus cash isn’t used for needed reforms.

But Dr. Carla Scott, a pediatrician, had her own message for Duncan, saying that if teachers, their unions and parents aren’t on board, the reforms Duncan — and President Barack Obama — are calling for could fail for lack of trying.

“We can’t have an extended school day; it’s against the teachers’ contract. We can’t have school on Saturdays; it’s against the teachers’ contracts. The engineers aren’t willing to come in on Saturdays, it’s against their contracts,” Scott said. “That’s why everybody has to be at the table to say what kinds of changes do we need to make and what kind of changes are you willing to put into your contract.”

Officials from more than two dozen urban school districts, including Scott, visited the White House as Duncan told them that if funding from the $787-billion stimulus bill is used to perpetuate the status quo, the funding will dry up. Money is expected to be doled out a bit at a time and will eventually flow more to districts making successful changes.

Scott said that will require more than just school boards and superintendents being involved, adding that she’d like to see a standard national contract for schools drawn up that indicates where unions are willing to give in order to put reforms into place.

The Detroit school district, with a deficit of more than $200 million and a new state-appointed financial manager, is in bad shape. But it also is set to get $530 million, though its financial manager said that money won’t likely be used to plug the deficit because that would just delay making necessary changes.

Arne Duncan- Can he save Urban Education?

WATCH THE SECOND VIDEO FIRST!!!!!!

While the world had me looking at Michelle Rhee and Linda Darling Hammonds as possible  candidates for the top job in Education, here comes Arne Duncan. Without me being too sarcastic, I hope that the only reason that our President elect did not pick one of these two very talented women is because they don’t play basketball…lol

In 2007, only 17 percent of eighth graders tested at or above grade level in reading in Chicago Public Schools – the school system administered by Arne Duncan since 2001. 

President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday tapped Duncan to become secretary of education in the upcoming administration. 

Duncan, hailed by Obama as a reformer, said he would like to take the lessons he learned in Chicago with him when he moves to Washington. “I’m also eager to apply some of the lessons we have learned here in Chicago to help school districts all across our country,” Duncan said after Obama formally named him to the job in Chicago.

I agree with David Boaz who states “ In seven years running the Chicago public schools, this longtime friend of Obama was apparently not able to produce a single public school that Obama considered good enough for his own children.”

 

I am anxious to see what programs Mr. Duncan has in store for schools around the country.  Because he has experience leading an urban school system, I hope that he will introduce policies that will be a win-win-win for students, parents and educators.

180 days and counting……….

Some school years go beyond state-required 180 days

By Dan Hardy

Inquirer Staff Writer

By tradition, Labor Day marks the great divide between an 11-week summer vacation and the start of school for most students.For a small but growing number of children in the Philadelphia area and around the country, however, it’s just another three-day holiday weekend.

Students at the KIPP Philadelphia Charter School have been in class since Aug. 11. The school’s 340 students, in grades five to eight, get 193 days of instruction, far more than the state-required 180 days. It also has a longer school day and students come in on Saturdays for extracurricular activities.

School CEO Marc Mannella said the added time was needed because many students were years behind academically when they enter fifth grade. “As far as I know, there’s no pixie dust that I can sprinkle over a child’s head to make up for years of wasted educational opportunity. It simply takes more time to catch them up,” he said.

Students buy into the idea. “The long hours are so they can actually teach you and help you achieve your goals and do good in class,” said fifth grader Alissa Smith. “They want to help us learn and help us get a better education so we can go to a good high school and college.”

Others say all American students need more time in class to compete with students from other countries who often get more instructional time and score higher on standardized tests.

The United States ties at 28th out of 29 countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development at 22.2 hours of instruction per week. South Korea ranks first at 30.2 hours.

“We believe that the extra time in school in other countries has had a significant impact” on their achievement, said Jennifer Davis, who heads the National Center on Time and Learning in Boston, which advocates more time in school.

Strong American Schools, an education reform group, advocates more school time to increase America’s ability to compete in the global economy. Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Poland, South Korea, and other nations have school days that are on average as much as 25 percent longer than in the United States, the group said.

Though the attention being paid to the issue is growing, the topic is not new: 25 years ago, the Nation at Risk study of American education called for seven hours of classroom instruction each day and 200 to 220 days in school.

In most schools, not much has changed. A recent survey by the National Center on Time and Learning had 28 states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, requiring 180 days of instruction, 12 with fewer days and only four – Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan and Ohio – with more. Six states set only total hours of instruction or leave it to school boards to decide.

Still, an increasing number of states, districts and charters have extended-time programs. In Massachusetts, 26 schools, most of them low-performing, will begin this year with students spending at least 30 percent more time in school. The state pays $1,300 more per student.

That initiative inspired Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy to introduce the Time for Innovation Matters in Education (TIME) Act in August; it calls for $350 million in federal funding to set up similar programs.

In New Orleans, former Philadelphia schools CEO Paul Vallas extended the school day until 4:30 p.m. for the 12,500 students in the Recovery School District. He seeks to extend the school year by 20 days.

In Florida’s Miami-Dade district, students in 39 struggling schools have an hour a day more in school and five more school days a year.

In Pittsburgh, eight low-achieving schools added 45 minutes to the school day and 10 days to the school year.

Charter schools around the country often feature longer school days and years. “There are no shortcuts for success. If we want our students’ scores to grow academically, we have to put in a lot more time and effort,” said Jeremy Esposito, the head of Freedom Academy Charter in Camden, a KIPP school in session since Aug. 11.

In Pennsylvania, 254 districts reported an average school year of 181 days, up one day from four years ago. New Jersey does not keep student year statistics, but Department of Education spokesman Richard Vespucci said that most have 180-day schedules.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey require students to spend less than six hours per day in class: five hours and 53 minutes in New Jersey and five and a half hours a day in Pennsylvania.

Central Bucks Superintendent Robert Laws favors a shorter summer vacation and increasing the school calendar to around 200 days. His district now has 184. “If education is to be valued in this country, we should look at the calendar,” Laws said. “I don’t think it’s an urban issue, and I don’t think it’s just for the low-achieving. If we compare ourselves with other countries, we’ve got fewer days.”

The cost of extending school time works against change, because teachers unions say they want their members to be paid for more school time.

In Pennsylvania, 31 out of 501 districts have gotten state funding to expand school time, including Unionville Chadds Ford in Chester County and Jenkintown in Montgomery County. Jenkintown added 15 minutes to the school day, eliminated some half-days and plans to add two days, going from from 183 to 185, during the next two years.

“It’s simple: Kids learn more when we have more time to teach them,” said Tim Wade, superintendent.

Arlene Ackerman, Philadelphia’s new superintendent, says lagging students in particular need more time. “We have to give them more time if they need more time,” Ackerman said. She’s put the issue on her wish list for teacher negotiations.

Unions say they are not opposed to longer days but caution that more time in school is not the only solution to low achievement. “Everyone wants to find one silver bullet to close the achievement gap. There isn’t one,” said James Testerman, head of the Pennsylvania State Education Association.

Nicholas Ignatuk, Ridley superintendent, says extending the school year is not possible without federal funding.

“If it means raising local taxes, it is not going to happen,” he said.

Ignatuk said districts already extend the day and year with after-school tutoring and summer school. “The question is: do all students need it? If the vast majority of our seniors are graduating, getting good jobs and going on to good colleges, it may not be necessary for everybody.”

 

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Contact staff writer Dan Hardy at 610-627-2649 or dhardy@phillynews.com.

**In my district, students can stay afterschool for one to 2.5 hours per day. They take art, physical education and remediation classes. I have always taught my students twice a week for an extra hour and a half per day. Sometimes I was paid and sometimes I wasn’t but the payment for me was building up a child’s skills in a small group or individualized setting afterschool so that they can do better in my class during the school day. Most of the time afterschool was spent teaching students skills that they missed in the earlier grades, filling in the holes in their academic foundation skills.

Students from affluent communities have the resources to take karate, dance, gymnastics, swimming and tutorial classes. Students in poor urban communities don’t have those resources. The issue that I have with KIPP is that this is an example another charter school that requires a student/parent/teacher to fill out a contract concerning their behavior and the extra days of schooling.

What about the schools who don’t have those types of contracts? What about the schools that rely on regular communication between the parent and the teacher? What happens when you make a contract with parents who did not like school and maybe never graduated from school?  When I talked to my parents about their child staying afterschool, I always have a few who do not follow through with making sure that their children stay. They allow their children to come home afterschool or they want their children to come home and babysit younger siblings.  When children do not take advantage of these opportunities to master the basic skills, it ultimately catches up with them in high school and beyond.  I can not tell you the number of high school students that I have had  to teach missing elementary and middle school skills to. Most school districts subscribe to the strategy that if you teach a skill in first grade and the child doesn’t get it, that is fine because the child will see the skill again in second grade, third grade and fourth grade, etc. I don’t subscribe to that learning strategy.  If a child is not learning a particular math concept, then that child needs to stay afterschool so that we can figure out exactly what is preventing that child from learning. Most of the time it is because that child did not learn a skill that was taught in earlier grades.

180 days is not sufficient if we are really committed to preparing our children to work in a global society.

Dr. Julia Hare- If you don’t know her you better ask somebody!

 

My favorite part of Dr. Julia Hare’s speech at the State of Black America – 2007 is:

When they took discipline away from the parents, we found out that:

The teachers were afraid of the Principals.

The principals were afraid of the Superintendents.

The Superintendents were afraid of the School Board.

The School Board were afraid of the parents.

The parents were afraid of the the children.

The Children WERE NOT afraid of anyone!!!

I read two articles today, “Fixing Washington D.C.’ s School system by Jeff Chu” – Fast Company and “A Teachable Moment by Paul Tough” - New York Times.  Both articles support what Dr. Hare was talking about, however in Washington D.C., they have taken the school board out of the equation. In New Orleans, the district written about in “A Teachable Moment”, they are going back to site based management and if you as a principal don’t produce the results dictated by the district then you will be replaced by someone else or another charter school management group.

In both articles, the goal of both districts is to improve the type of instruction being provided to poor students in those cities. As an administrator or teacher, if you have stopped having and working towards high expectations for your students, then please retire!

Two school districts , using two different types of managerial styles but expecting the same results. I look forward to following these two school districts as well as Chicago, New York , Philadelphia and Atlanta this upcoming school year. Because if any of these school districts produce the types of high results mandated by NCLB, they will become the blueprint for other struggling school districts.

Sidenote: Even though New Orleans acknowledges the mental support that is needed for the students in their district. Budgetary constraints prevent NOLA from staffing the schools with the necessary Social Work, Psychological, Counseling Professionals needed to help children be all that they can be! I haven’t read about Chancellor Rhee’s plan in regards to the psychological needs of the children. Right now, her major issue changing the current teacher senority-pay system. Reinstating music and art programs in all of the schools is very much needed but so are Social Workers, Counselors, Psychologists and Psychiatrists.

Project 119- Leave No Future Olympian Behind! – Part 2

 

RAY SUAREZ: Professor, tell us about the nationwide sports school system. How does it work?  

SUSAN BROWNELL: The Chinese sports system consists of about 3,000 sports schools of different types. So the sports schools at the local level are spare-time schools where children can go after they attend their regular classes.

Then, if they move up the scale, if they’re good enough, they’ll be recruited into a sports boarding school. And there they have exited the regular educational system and they board at the school where their education may not be — may not get the attention that probably it should get.

And from that point, maybe they will be recruited onto the provincial team. The provincial and municipal teams are really the backbone of the Chinese sports system. And once you get onto that team, you’re essentially a professional athlete, although they don’t like to use that word. They prefer to call them “specialized athletes” and to think that the financial aid they get is something like a college scholarship would be in the United States.

And then, finally, there are sports where there are national teams. And those are sports where the best provincial athletes are further recruited to a national centralized team, which will train either in Beijing or in training centers around the country.

RAY SUAREZ: The way I understand it, these schools basically make the athlete into a ward of the state for as long as they remain in the system. Is there an advantage to families who were able to place a child into the national sports system?

SUSAN BROWNELL: Education is really highly valued by Chinese parents. And for that reason, well-educated parents and parents from white-collar backgrounds are usually not in favor of their children joining a sports boarding school.

So most athletes come from peasant backgrounds or worker backgrounds, except maybe for a few sports which are very popular here, such as badminton and table tennis, it is said will be able to recruit children from white-collar backgrounds more so than other sports.

Certain sports are called “the bitter sports,” such as weight-lifting, long distance running, race walking. And those sports are considered to be sort of physically uncomfortable. And those are the ones that typically are — the athletes almost all come from peasant backgrounds.

So basically, in China, the sports system is seen as a means of social mobility. I know there’s a stereotype in the Western media that it’s a system that ruins lives, but, in fact, the perception in China is that, in most cases, it’s a ticket to a better life, especially for peasants who are given a residence permit once they make the provincial sports team.

And this is really a big advantage in life for a peasant who comes from a rural background where he’s held to that background through the residence permit system, a rural residence permit.

 

There are some things about China that I do not want to adopt, there are some ideas that I do. Project 119 should be looked at by our U.S. politicians. Instead of eliminating the physical education programs in elementary schools, especially the more impoverished areas, they should be investing more money into the programs. As of Today, China has more gold medals than United States. Their percentage for gold and silver medals is around 80% whereas our percentage of silver and gold out of the total amount of medals won is around 63%. In order for United States to reclaim their status, they are going to have to invest more money into schools that can recruit and train potential Olympic winners. Now I am not saying that all potential winners come from the inner cities but without an adequate physical education program in the inner cities, we are definitely missing out on a number of potential Olympic winners.

I love Micheal Phelps’ story because he was a child who used swimming as a positive outlet for his bundled up energy.  I know plenty of children who could and would benefit from a structured swimming, gymnastics, golf, tennis, rowing program. In order to prepare for the global games, we are going to have to adopt a more global view of education and not just reading, writing and arithmetic. We are going to have to embrace a more progressive way of ensuring that all children are given the opportunity to explore their Olympic dreams.