- Impact Implodes as Rhee's Legacy Unravels
- Questions Are Raised About Online Schools
- A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute
- Screen Time Higher Than Ever for Children
Impact Implodes as Rhee's Legacy Unravels
The Washington Informer
By Examiner Editorial
October 24, 2011
It didn't take long to start unraveling Impact, the widely-touted teacher evaluation tool initiated by former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. As Examiner reporter Lisa Gartner first reported, Council chairman Kwame Brown wants to waive Impact evaluations up to three years so more "highly effective" teachers will want to work in the city's poorest schools. They would still be eligible for performance bonuses up to $10,000.
The Washington Teachers Union has predictably endorsed Brown's plan to remove the stick while retaining the carrot, which is one of the main reasons why his idea should be rejected. Impact evaluations hold teachers responsible for their students' achievement. Waiving them in the very schools that most desperately need good teaching is worse than counterproductive, it's an abandonment of another generation of kids to inadequate educations. But Impact scores are not only based on test results. Five times a year, master educators grade teachers' professionalism and ability to collaborate. Those not performing up to par receive feedback and extra coaching. Teachers who fail to improve after two years of additional help can be terminated.
It's no coincidence that nearly twice the number of "highly effective" educators teach in affluent Ward 3 instead of more challenging Wards seven and eight where they would be equally responsible for improving test scores. And despite a highest-in-the-nation expenditure of nearly $20,000 per student and steady improvement since 2003, DCPS reading and math scores still remain far below the national average.
Progress claimed by Michelle Rhee, who was appointed chancellor by former Mayor Adrian Fenty in 2007, has been under fire since before her departure under Mayor Vincent Gray. The Washington-based Albert Shanker Institute maintains that demographic changes, a new test, and statistical manipulation that excluded some students from the testing pool generated "artificial increases" in DCPS scores. And a January 2011 study by Dr. Alan Ginsburg, a former U.S. Department of Education official, found that the improvement rates under Rhee were no better than under predecessors Clifford Janey and Paul Vance. A test cheating scandal involving more than 100 D.C. public schools during Rhee's three-year tenure has further marred her legacy.
Children who were kindergarteners when Rhee became chancellor are now in fourth grade, so the 2011 NAEP scores released on November 1 will indicate who's right. But one of Rhee's major accomplishments was standing up to a complacent unionized labor force that had forgotten its responsibility to the community. Teacher accountability was Impact's major impact on DCPS, and it would be a grave mistake to abandon it now.
Questions Are Raised About Online Schools
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
October 25, 2011
As an increasing number of cash-strapped states turn to virtual schools — where computers replace classmates and students learn via the Internet — a new study is raising questions about their quality and oversight.
In research to be released Tuesday, scholars Kevin G. Welner and Gene V. Glass at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado assert that full-time virtual schools are largely unregulated.
Once used by home-schoolers, child actors and others in need of a flexible way to learn outside a classroom, virtual schools have grown in popularity in the past several years. Cyber-schools generally operate as charters, outside the traditional system but funded with taxpayer dollars.
Nationwide, more than 200,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual school programs, in which students have no face-to-face contact with teachers. And virtual schools are the fastest growing alternative to traditional public schools, the study found.
Supporters say they allow students to learn at their own pace and provide access to teachers and subjects that may not be available at traditional schools. Critics say they siphon resources and deprive students of socialization.
Their spread comes despite a lack of any data about their impact on children from kindergarten through high school, the researchers found. “We’re going whole hog into something that we don’t have research on,” Welner said.
Many supporters trumpet a 2009 analysis by the U.S. Education Department, which looked at published studies and concluded that online students performed “modestly better,” on average, than those getting face-to-face instruction. But the federal report compared traditional students with those who received a “hybrid” education combining online courses and face-to-face instruction, Welner and Glass said.
The lack of data on full-time virtual education far outstrips other areas of American education, Welner said in a recent interview: “Without evidentiary support, I would not say, ‘Try this out.’ You’re basically becoming a guinea pig.”
Although often embraced by policymakers as less expensive than brick-and-mortar schools, virtual schools often receive the same per-pupil funding from governments despite having a much higher student-to-teacher ratio and no costs for transportation or classrooms, the researchers said.
“Private operators are gaining access to large streams of public revenue, but the public is not getting full information on the actual costs of these programs, so it’s not clear if taxpayer money is being used properly,” Glass said.
Five for-profit companies account for most full-time virtual schools: K12, Educational Options, Apex Learning, Plato: A+LS and Connections Academy.
Welner and Glass’s suggestions include:
Authentication: Because it’s possible for others to complete students’ work or take tests, schools should take measures to confirm identity, such as using a trusted organization to administer in-person exams.
Accreditation: Virtual schools should be accredited by independent firms or agencies.
Audits: States should conduct financial audits of the firms that run virtual schools to determine actual costs and whether the per-pupil payment is reasonable.
A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute
The New York Times
By Matt Richtel
October 22, 2011
LOS ALTOS, Calif. — The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.
This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.
The Waldorf method is nearly a century old, but its foothold here among the digerati puts into sharp relief an intensifying debate about the role of computers in education.
“I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,” said Alan Eagle, 50, whose daughter, Andie, is one of the 196 children at the Waldorf elementary school; his son William, 13, is at the nearby middle school. “The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”
Mr. Eagle knows a bit about technology. He holds a computer science degree from Dartmouth and works in executive communications at Google, where he has written speeches for the chairman, Eric E. Schmidt. He uses an iPad and a smartphone. But he says his daughter, a fifth grader, “doesn’t know how to use Google,” and his son is just learning. (Starting in eighth grade, the school endorses the limited use of gadgets.)
Three-quarters of the students here have parents with a strong high-tech connection. Mr. Eagle, like other parents, sees no contradiction. Technology, he says, has its time and place: “If I worked at Miramax and made good, artsy, rated R movies, I wouldn’t want my kids to see them until they were 17.”
While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with workbooks and No. 2 pencils.
On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination. The long-term goal: make socks.
Down the hall, a teacher drilled third-graders on multiplication by asking them to pretend to turn their bodies into lightning bolts. She asked them a math problem — four times five — and, in unison, they shouted “20” and zapped their fingers at the number on the blackboard. A roomful of human calculators.
In second grade, students standing in a circle learned language skills by repeating verses after the teacher, while simultaneously playing catch with bean bags. It’s an exercise aimed at synchronizing body and brain. Here, as in other classes, the day can start with a recitation or verse about God that reflects a nondenominational emphasis on the divine.
Andie’s teacher, Cathy Waheed, who is a former computer engineer, tries to make learning both irresistible and highly tactile. Last year she taught fractions by having the children cut up food — apples, quesadillas, cake — into quarters, halves and sixteenths.
“For three weeks, we ate our way through fractions,” she said. “When I made enough fractional pieces of cake to feed everyone, do you think I had their attention?”
Some education experts say that the push to equip classrooms with computers is unwarranted because studies do not clearly show that this leads to better test scores or other measurable gains.
Is learning through cake fractions and knitting any better? The Waldorf advocates make it tough to compare, partly because as private schools they administer no standardized tests in elementary grades. And they would be the first to admit that their early-grade students may not score well on such tests because, they say, they don’t drill them on a standardized math and reading curriculum.
When asked for evidence of the schools’ effectiveness, the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America points to research by an affiliated group showing that 94 percent of students graduating from Waldorf high schools in the United States between 1994 and 2004 attended college, with many heading to prestigious institutions like Oberlin, Berkeley and Vassar.
Of course, that figure may not be surprising, given that these are students from families that value education highly enough to seek out a selective private school, and usually have the means to pay for it. And it is difficult to separate the effects of the low-tech instructional methods from other factors. For example, parents of students at the Los Altos school say it attracts great teachers who go through extensive training in the Waldorf approach, creating a strong sense of mission that can be lacking in other schools.
Absent clear evidence, the debate comes down to subjectivity, parental choice and a difference of opinion over a single world: engagement. Advocates for equipping schools with technology say computers can hold students’ attention and, in fact, that young people who have been weaned on electronic devices will not tune in without them.
Ann Flynn, director of education technology for the National School Boards Association, which represents school boards nationwide, said computers were essential. “If schools have access to the tools and can afford them, but are not using the tools, they are cheating our children,” Ms. Flynn said.
Paul Thomas, a former teacher and an associate professor of education at Furman University, who has written 12 books about public educational methods, disagreed, saying that “a spare approach to technology in the classroom will always benefit learning.”
“Teaching is a human experience,” he said. “Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”
And Waldorf parents argue that real engagement comes from great teachers with interesting lesson plans.
“Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers,” said Pierre Laurent, 50, who works at a high-tech start-up and formerly worked at Intel and Microsoft. He has three children in Waldorf schools, which so impressed the family that his wife, Monica, joined one as a teacher in 2006.
And where advocates for stocking classrooms with technology say children need computer time to compete in the modern world, Waldorf parents counter: what’s the rush, given how easy it is to pick up those skills?
“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”
There are also plenty of high-tech parents at a Waldorf school in San Francisco and just north of it at the Greenwood School in Mill Valley, which doesn’t have Waldorf accreditation but is inspired by its principles.
California has some 40 Waldorf schools, giving it a disproportionate share — perhaps because the movement is growing roots here, said Lucy Wurtz, who, along with her husband, Brad, helped found the Waldorf high school in Los Altos in 2007. Mr. Wurtz is chief executive of Power Assure, which helps computer data centers reduce their energy load.
The Waldorf experience does not come cheap: annual tuition at the Silicon Valley schools is $17,750 for kindergarten through eighth grade and $24,400 for high school, though Ms. Wurtz said financial assistance was available. She says the typical Waldorf parent, who has a range of elite private and public schools to choose from, tends to be liberal and highly educated, with strong views about education; they also have a knowledge that when they are ready to teach their children about technology they have ample access and expertise at home.
The students, meanwhile, say they don’t pine for technology, nor have they gone completely cold turkey. Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates say they occasionally watch movies. One girl, whose father works as an Apple engineer, says he sometimes asks her to test games he is debugging. One boy plays with flight-simulator programs on weekends.
The students say they can become frustrated when their parents and relatives get so wrapped up in phones and other devices. Aurad Kamkar, 11, said he recently went to visit cousins and found himself sitting around with five of them playing with their gadgets, not paying attention to him or each other. He started waving his arms at them: “I said: ‘Hello guys, I’m here.’ ”
Finn Heilig, 10, whose father works at Google, says he liked learning with pen and paper — rather than on a computer — because he could monitor his progress over the years.
“You can look back and see how sloppy your handwriting was in first grade. You can’t do that with computers ’cause all the letters are the same,” Finn said. “Besides, if you learn to write on paper, you can still write if water spills on the computer or the power goes out."
Screen Time Higher Than Ever for Children
The New York Times
By Tamar Lewin
October 25, 2011
Jaden Lender, 3, sings along softly with the “Five Little Monkeys” app on the family iPad, and waggles his index finger along with the monkey doctor at the warning, “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” He likes crushing the ants in “Ant Smasher,” and improving his swing in the golf app. But he is no app addict: when the one featuring Grover from Sesame Street does not work right, Jaden says, “Come on, iPad!’” — then wanders happily off to play with his train set.
“I’ll lie to myself that these are skill builders,’” said his father, Keith Lender, who has downloaded dozens of tablet and smart phone apps for Jaden and his 1-year-old brother, Dylan. “No, I’m not lying,” he said, correcting himself. “Jaden’s really learning hand-eye coordination from the golf game, and it beats the hell out of sitting and watching television.”
Despite the American Academy of Pediatricians’ longstanding recommendations to the contrary, children under 8 are spending more time than ever in front of screens, according to a study scheduled for release Tuesday.
The report also documents for the first time an emerging “app gap” in which affluent children are likely to use mobile educational games while those in low-income families are the most likely to have televisions in their bedrooms.
The study, by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco nonprofit group, is the first of its kind since apps became widespread, and the first to look at screen time from birth. It found that almost half the families with incomes above $75,000 had downloaded apps specifically for their young children, compared with one in eight of the families earning less than $30,000. More than a third of those low-income parents said they did not know what an “app” — short for application — was.
“The app gap is a big deal and a harbinger of the future,” said James Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, which had 1,384 parents surveyed this spring for the study. “It’s the beginning of an important shift, as parents increasingly are handing their iPhones to their 1 ½-year-old kid as a shut-up toy. And parents who check their e-mail three times on the way to the bus stop are constantly modeling that behavior, so it’s only natural the kids want to use mobile devices too.”
The study found that fully half of children under 8 had access to a mobile device like a smartphone, a video iPod, or an iPad or other tablet. Of course, television is still the elephant in the children’s media room, accounting for the largest share of their screen time: about half of children under 2 watch TV or DVDs on a typical day, according to the study, and those who do spend an average of almost two hours in front of the screen. Among all children under 2, the average is 53 minutes a day of television or DVDs — more than twice the 23 minutes a day the survey found children are read to.
And almost a third of children under 2 have televisions in their bedrooms, a substantial increase from 2005, when the Kaiser Foundation found that 19 percent of children ages 6 months to 23 months had them. In families with annual incomes under $30,000, the new study found, 64 percent of children under 8 had televisions in their rooms, compared with 20 percent in families with incomes above $75,000.
Computers are common as well: about 12 percent of children 2 to 4 use them every day, and 24 percent at least once a week, the study found; among those 5 to 8, 22 percent use a computer daily, 46 percent more once a week. On average, the children who use computers started doing so at age 3 ½.
The report found that despite more than a decade of warnings from the American Academy of Pediatricians that screen time offers no benefits for children under 2, “only 14 percent of the parents surveyed said their doctor had ever discussed media use with them,” said Vicky Rideout, its author.
“I get the impression that a lot of parents do not take the recommendation that seriously,” she said. “Part of it may be wishful thinking. Parents like their media, and it’s really tough to resist the lure of putting your kid in front of something that purports to be educational and will keep them occupied.”
The media landscape changes so rapidly that up-to-date data can be hard to come by. “The last time we did a study, there were no apps,” Ms. Rideout noted.
Some tech-savvy parents use different platforms to tailor their children’s screen time.
Jeannie Crowley, who helps faculty members at the Bank Street College of Education integrate technology into teaching, got rid of television at home because of the ads and branding.
But Ms. Crowley hands her iPad over to her 19-month-old daughter, Maggie, to play with the Smule piano app. And at bedtime, the family often watches “30 Rock” on the computer, Maggie dancing to the opening music. The toddler also loves YouTube videos of barking dogs.
And she is also adept with her mother’s smartphone.
“She learned how to unlock it, observationally, about two months ago.” Ms Crowley said. “About two weeks ago, she was on the train with me, and she popped the slide bar. And I’ve seen her use the bottom of her sweater to rub the screen clean, because she knows that’s something Mommy does.”
Most of all, Maggie likes to watch the cellphone videos her parents take of her stomping on leaves, getting sticky sap on her hands or wearing her new pink polka dot pajamas.
“We can look at ducks, and afterwards, we can look at the pictures and talk about ducks,” Ms. Crowley said. “It’s a way to reinforce her language skills, and let the other parent see what her day was like.”
David Wingard downloaded his first baby app when his son, Alexander, was 8 months old.
“It was a free app a friend showed me, doodle something, where the screen is black, but when you move your finger across the screen it changes colors,” Mr. Wingard recalled. “Alex thought it was cool for a few seconds, then he tried to put it in his mouth.”
Now a more mature 14 months, Alex’s attention span for apps has grown. “If we’re stuck on the subway, he’ll play with them for three, maybe five, minutes,” Mr. Wingard said.
He and his wife still don’t use them much, he said: “We’re scared he’ll break the phone.”