Fewer Preschool Programs Foretell a Bleak Future
By Deborah Williams
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Low-income kindergarten students who have not been enrolled in a quality preschool program tend to be about 18 months behind their peers. For this reason, public education has expanded the number of preschool programs across the nation until they became one of the casualties of the budget cuts that school systems have had to address.
Kimberly Hefling writes on The Huffington Post website in her article, “Public Pre-Kindergarten Programs Slowed, Even Reversed, by Recession,” that the current budget cuts mean that many three- and four-year-olds are not going to preschool.
Research shows that many of these students will start far behind their peers, never catch up, end up in exceptional education classes, and often drop out of school. Usually, students are eligible if they qualify for free or reduced lunch, but in this economy more students fall into that category; however, there are not enough slots to accommodate them.
The future is bleak for these children because, according to Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education in Albany, New York, “more of them will end up out of work or they will make less money than they would’ve otherwise and more of them will end up in prison.”
Here’s an example of how this situation is hurting Michigan preschoolers:
Topics: Child Development, Education Policies and News | No Comments »
An Alternative to Printed Textbooks
By Deborah Williams
The recent announcement of Apple’s iBooks 2 may signal a paradigm shift for students in the near future. NPR’s website posts an article “Apple Pushes to Put Interactive Textbooks on iPads” that lays out Apple’s plan to replace a typical student’s stack of printed textbooks. Their launch will begin with electronic versions of some high school textbooks from well-known educational publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill.
Of course, these versions have interactive features such as animation and explanatory videos to accompany the content. The primary allure of this offering is that each electronic textbook is only about $15. The drawback? The iPads are about $500 each. Currently, school systems go through a lengthy adoption process to choose the textbook, and they use those adopted texts for several years before choosing another one to replace it.
How this would play out is unclear. Spending thousands of dollars on a textbook adoption happens about once every five or six years, so would electronic textbooks mean that a school system would be spending money each year for textbooks? Another consideration is that the initial outlay for iBooks would be significant and would need to be replaced every three or four years. It will be interesting to see how Apple and its eventual competitors will infuse this into the education culture.
The following video gives a more enhanced explanation of this educational launch:
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Top Schools in the Nation
By Deborah Williams
Topics: Education Policies and News | No Comments »
The Surprising Effects of a Good Teacher
By Deborah Williams
- Less likely to become pregnant as teenagers
- More likely to enroll in college
- More likely to earn more money as adults
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Colleges Welcome Parent Groups
By Deborah Williams
A recent Education Week blog post describes an emerging trend that uses the talents and interests of their students’ parents. The post acknowledges that today’s college students are the children of parents who have been continuously focused and involved in every aspect of their children’s lives and educations; they have used all of their resources to provide as many trips, sports, activities, and supplemental education that often included finding a tutor to remediate and/or prevent weaknesses.
Colleges realize that many of them continue to be involved, and they want to leverage that desire by inviting them to participate in specially formed parent boards. These parents are seen as a rich fundraising group that also can assist with internships and recruiting of new students. These colleges also comply with these parents’ need to have information about “financial aid, graduation rates, and job placement.”
Despite this new trend, the blog writer, Caralee Adams, referred to a piece written in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that suggests that colleges should balance this trend with “the need to maintain policies of privacy that allow students to fight their own battles with grades and disciplinary issues so they can emerge from college as adults ready for the real world.”
Topics: College Preparation and Advice, Parenting | No Comments »
Sex Education for Teens, Online or via Texts
By Deborah Williams
Some school districts have chosen to provide immediate, anonymous sex education information for their adolescents through the technology that they have at hand. Jan Hoffman, a reporter for The New York Times, posted an article, “Sex Education Gets Directly to Youths, via Text,” on its education blog. Hoffman explained that this availability of sex education information is made in response to recent budget cuts for schools and health departments. Consequently, several school divisions and their local health departments have created websites and text messaging services to address the need to help their teens.
These services are available in several locations:
Sex-Ed Loop – Chicago-based subscription service that includes automated weekly texts
Hookup – California teens can text their ZIP codes to receive health clinic locations
Sexetc.org – national site “run by and for teenagers”
Real Talk – run by AIDS Council of Northeastern New York as an H.I.V. prevention program
In response to abstinence-based proponents, the National Abstinence Education Association will launch a new online service for teens.
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The WISE Prize, the Newest Prize in Global Education
By Deborah Williams
Vicki Cobb, writer for Education Update Online, shared the exclusive announcement of outstanding educational achievement. World education leaders have given the first of a new prestigious prize in education.
The WISE Prize, given by the World Innovation Summit for Education, is “an honor awarded for transformative work in education. The first WISE Prize laureate, Dr. Fazle Hazan Abed of Bangladesh, received the gold medal and $500,000 “in recognition of his 40-year career dedicated to alleviating poverty through education.”
Dr. Abed was chosen after a committee of 11 experts made a preliminary assessment from an international call for nominations and a high-level jury of five individuals including the WISE Chairman.
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Young Women Leave the Workforce to Increase Education
By Deborah Williams
Huffington Post reporter, Catherine Rampell, reports that part of the reason for November’s lower unemployment rate is the shrinking labor force. Economists realize that some of those work force dropouts are young people who are upgrading their skills.
For the first time in 30 years, there are more young women in school than in the work force. While their male counterparts are more willing to take any job that they can find, young women are using the country’s economic problems as a chance to improve their skill sets with more training. Many of them feel that women are at a distinct disadvantage already, and more training will give them an advantage when the economy improves.
Rampell reports that more than 400,000 young women have dropped out of the labor force entirely as they seek more education.
Topics: College Preparation and Advice, Education Policies and News, Motivation and Self Improvement | No Comments »
Kindergarten Math, Key to Academic Success
By Deborah Williams
Eleanor Yang Su, writer for Huff Post Education, posted a recent article about the ongoing debate within kindergarten curricula: “Is it more important for kindergarteners to focus on academics and learn their ABC’s and numbers? Or spend more time on social and emotional issues, like how to play nice and pay attention?” She writes that research done by University of Irvine education professor, Greg Duncan, shows that an important predictor of academic success for kindergarteners is to learn math skills. He and his colleagues found that kindergarteners who learned the most math “tended to have the highest math and reading scores years later. Duncan reports that children’s later achievement is best served by these key factors (in order of importance):
- math skills
- reading skills
- attention skills
Duncan suggests that kindergarten teachers teach more math—“simple things like learning shapes and numbers and the concept of smaller and bigger numbers along a number line.” He suggests that parents “point out shapes to their kids and play cards and board games to help them get comfortable with counting.”
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Free Online Courses at M.I.T. Expand to Offer Certification
By Deborah Williams
Tamar Lewin, writer for The New York Times, penned an article about the planned expansion of online courses at one of America’s most elite universities. A leader in the era of online learning ten years ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will offer courses free of charge to anyone anywhere, and it will give official certificates if mastery is demonstrated. These interactive online courses will give students “access to online laboratories, self-assessments, and student-to-student discussions.” While the access to the M.I.T.’s courses will be free, students probably will need to pay an “affordable” fee for certification. This probably will establish a trend in higher education because a student with credentials from M.I.T. should be helpful in any industry.
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