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.”
Topics: Child Development | No Comments »
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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Quiet Libraries, a Thing of the Past?
By Deborah Williams
In a nod to the changing trends in how to engage students and how they learn, some librarians are changing the traditionally quiet ambiance of their libraries to one in which noise is norm. The Hechinger Report’s Nick Pandolfo reports in his article “In Some U.S. Schools, Librarians are no Longer Saying ‘Shh!’” that some librarians like Buffy Hamilton, librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia have re-imagined their role by “focusing on enhancing lessons and class projects with tools of the digital world to access, organize and evaluate information.” She sees her job as one of “helping teachers and students explore new mediums for learning.” The “hum of learning” that now exists in her school’s library is a mirror of what’s going on in many school libraries around the country. It seems to be a sign of the times, and the days of expecting absolute silence in a library might be rapidly coming to an end.
Topics: Education Policies and News | No Comments »
Military Children, Better Test Performance
By Deborah Williams
One might be surprised to learn that, according to a recent story on The New York Times website, that children attending military base schools have outperformed their counterparts in public schools. Reporter, Michael Winerip, reports in “Military Children Stay a Step Ahead of Public School Students” that those schools also have an achievement gaps between black and white students, but that gap is much smaller than at public schools, and it is shrinking faster than in public schools.
So, what’s the difference? What are some possible reasons for the better showing in schools on military bases? Winerip offers a number of possibilities:
- Standardized tests are not used to rate the performance of teachers, principals, or the schools.
- Students receive no test preparation; they are used “to identify a child’s academic weaknesses and assess the effectiveness of the curriculum.”
- It appears “that military base schools are more nurturing than public schools.”
- Principals have complete discretion about how to evaluate their teachers in military base schools.
- The average early education class size is much smaller than in public schools; it’s comparable to many private schools.
- Military base administration and teachers’ unions have good relationships; their relationship is not contentious, as it tends to be within public schools.
- Students in military base schools tend to come from more financially stable homes since at least one parent is employed (in the military), and there are no worries about health care or adequate housing.
- Because the military command puts such a high priority on education, parents are supported when they need to take time off to attend to educational matters.
- Military base schools seem to treat all students fairly with no regard to race.
Topics: Education Policies and News | No Comments »
Academic Discrimination at Top Colleges?
By Deborah Williams
A recent post on the Huffington Post’s education blog, “Some Asian Students Don’t Identify as Asian for College Admissions” describes the common practice by many students of Asian descent to decline to indicate their Asian ethnicity on their college applications. That’s because “for many years, many Asian Americans have been convinced that it’s harder for them to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges.”
Studies have shown that despite the fact that Asians represent only six percent of the United States population, they meet the standards for college admission far out of proportion to their representation in the population. Furthermore, it is noted that those colleges with race-blind admissions have twice the percentage of Asian students of the Ivy League schools.
The major concern is that those students who indicate that they are Asian are competing against the many other Asians who are extraordinarily high-achievers, so they are often denied admission into schools for which they qualify.
Topics: College Preparation and Advice | 1 Comment »
Educator Appeal for Low-Tech Tools
By Deborah Williams
One would expect that all schools in America’s Silicon Valley would embrace technology tools for teaching and learning, but NBC education reporter, Raheema Ellis recently reported on the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, an elite private school in Silicon Valley where the staff has chosen traditional teaching tools like blackboards over Promethean boards.
Teachers at this school, which educates the children of Silicon Valley’s technology innovators, believe that instruction should be a hands-on experience but without computers. Their parents, who make a very comfortable living working for tech companies like Google, agree with this philosophy and don’t want their children on computers either. The Waldorf method is over 100 years old, and infuses art, movement, and even gardening in their instruction. In the upper grades, computers are used but sparingly when needed. The school’s focus is to enhance their students’ ability to think creatively and critically, and they believe that technology constrains those attributes in children.
Of course, proponents of technology use in education who see the benefits of learning online view technology as a tool only. Most educators support a strong core curriculum that fosters critical thinking and creativity but one that is supported by various tools including technology.
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Topics: Education Policies and News | No Comments »
Losing Science Majors
By Deborah Williams
With all the effort given these days to promote STEM (Science Technology Engineering, and Mathematics) learning among America’s students, it is quite troubling that a recent New York Times article on its website “Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)” by Christopher Drew points out that about 40% of science and engineering majors change their majors or drop out of school and never earn a degree. The percentage of dropouts or students who change their majors is even higher (60%) among pre-medical students. UCLA education professor, Mitchell J. Chang believes that it’s not really a matter of not being prepared adequately in elementary and secondary school. He thinks that the competition among these talented students “overwhelms even well-qualified students.”
Most of the attrition comes from engineering and pre-med students who may not have had adequate math preparation or who aren’t willing to work hard enough. Additionally, many of those students find their freshman classes challenging, and the classes in the subsequent years tend to be mainly theory class—classes that don’t feed many students’ passions. Peter Kilpatrick, dean of engineering at Notre Dame, cites the engineering school’s success in retaining students by creating design projects and reducing the lecture experience to meet with smaller groups of students. The engineering school used to retain between 50 to 55 percent of its students, but now it retains more than 75 percent.
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Middle School, Time to Plan the Future
By Deborah Williams
Armed with research findings, school officials in Mississippi have begun a new initiative for its eighth graders called Pathways to Success. Nora Fleming’s Education Week article, “Middle Schoolers Getting Prepped for College,” describes an emerging trend based on mounting evidence that “college- and career-readiness programs targeted at middle schoolers” cannot just help students to determine what their career goals are but, also, should help them to determine what the steps are that would lead to that career goal.
The research asserts that middle school is the best time to guide students toward this two-part discovery: what they might be best suited to do and how to make that happen. The National Association of Secondary School Principals associate director of middle-level services, Patti Kinney reminds readers, “Effective middle-grades schools help students understand their potential and give them multiple opportunities to explore the future through a variety of experiences, support, and guidance.” Pathways to Success seeks to involve middle school students, their parents, their schools, and the community to put those students on the right path to improve their chances of having a successful career.
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One-to-One Laptop Initiative
By Deborah Williams
Four years ago, the Mooresville Graded School District in North Carolina made the shift to a data-driven instructional model that included the use of technology in a one-to-one distribution of laptops to all of its students in grades three through twelve. Recently, writer for THE Journal, Bridget McCrea interviewed Mooresville’s CTO, Scott Smith, to learn the results of this “digital conversion” in the article “Measuring 1:1 Results” on THE Journal website.
The greatest challenge was in the area of staff development: Many teachers were reluctant to switch to this new methodology involving online learning with laptops. Many threatened to retire. However, many were “early adopters who bought into the change and a bunch of others in the middle who were saying, ‘Give me time and we will get there.’” Scott noted that, overall, the results were very positive, and he touted several outcomes of the initiative:
· Increase in school attendance
· Decrease in school dropout rate
· Decrease in student suspensions
· Increase in the graduation rate
· Increase in the end-of-course exam scores
It’s safe to say that this initiative has been successful and that instruction will never be as it was.
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