It is unfortunate that the charter school industry now finds itself on the wrong side of educational progress and civil rights history, even as spokesmen like Nelson Smith, writing at Miller-McCune.com last month, engage in a public relations campaign aimed to minimize awareness of the segregated conditions that exist in the majority of American charter schools today. Whether located in the poorest, brownest neighborhoods of the Twin Cities or in the leafiest, whitest suburbs of North Carolina, charter schools often engage in a form of intensely segregated schooling that either contains or ... Read More
Asian-American Parenting and Academic Success
December 13, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Why do so many Asian-American kids do so well in school? Researchers are zeroing in on one important reason: the unique style of Asian-American parenting. A visit to the University of California's most selective campuses shows how very well Asian-American kids do academically: While Asian Americans constituted 14 percent of the state population in 2008, this fall they made up about 40 percent of the freshman class at UCLA and 37 percent of the entering class at University of California, Berkeley. But it's not just in California, and it's not just in college. The 2000 Census found that ... Read More
Detroit Reading Corps Battles Poor Test Scores
December 6, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
"These scores confirm that we have a reading emergency." So last December said Robert Bobb, appointed by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm in March 2009 to deal with Detroit Public Schools' persistent financial problems and has more recently exerted authority over academic matters. Longtime observers of the school district and its 138,000 students spread out over more than 100 campuses are intimately aware of a persistent decline in student achievement, a trend now several decades long. This was underscored in late 2009 with a report released by the National Assessment of Educational ... Read More
Teacher Training Too Academic, Not Practical
November 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Much of the furor over how to fix local education systems has focused on teacher evaluation. How do we hold teachers accountable and reward them for student achievement? Should they be paid according to how well their students perform on standardized tests? And is it fair game to publish any metric that evaluates them that way — teacher names and all — in, say, the Los Angeles Times? The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education is floating another idea, one that looks not at how teachers are evaluated in the classroom, but the way they're taught before they get there. ... Read More
Pop-Up Books: More, in Fact, Is More
October 19, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
All it took was seeing an open pop-up book in a bookshop window in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s to inspire Waldo Hunt, the founder of the pop-up industry in the United States, to create a lifetime of learning and curiosity for millions of children and adults. I was one of those children. In 1956, at 8 years of age, I was given a die-cut Hallmark card that eventually led me into a 30-year fascination with printing, die-cut shapes and pop-up books — the latter a sculptural art form for storytelling and learning. So, that is why I was surprised to read Tom Jacobs’ Aug. 9, ... Read More
Baby’s Must-See TV Does Not Increase Vocabulary
October 18, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In 1997, the BBC launched Teletubbies, a controversial education program aimed specifically at children under the age of 4. In a bid to win over its presumed audience, the show affixed its main characters with the body proportions, behavior and language of infants. It became a critical and commercial success, despite occasional silliness surrounding one Teletubby character and another: the Rev. Jerry Falwell. The First World spends generously on infant media. Four years after the Teletubbies debut, The Walt Disney Co. bought the Baby Einstein Company, founded by a former teacher in Georgia, ... Read More
How to Win a Spelling Bee
October 11, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Spelling bees have become a surprisingly popular spectator sport, televised live and celebrated in books, films and a Broadway musical. Our fascination with this phenomenon is multifaceted, but it’s based in wonder at how those kids could possibly learn all those words. New research provides a clear answer: Because they studied. A lot. By themselves. That’s the conclusion of a team of scholars led by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth. Its study, just published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, is part of Duckworth’s ongoing ... Read More
Young Artists, Scientists Think Logically, Creatively
September 8, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Do scientists and artists think differently? Fifty years ago, novelist/physicist C.P. Snow famously fretted that the two disciplines were drifting apart, and subsequent research suggested he was onto something. Science students tended to excel at logical, analytical thinking, while budding artists scored highest in tests measuring imagination and creativity. But a newly published study of seniors at one British university reports that distinction has virtually vanished over the past five decades. Writing in the journal Thinking Skills and Creativity, Peter K. Williamson of the University of ... Read More
Children’s Pop-Up Books Flop as Learning Tool
August 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Around the mid-1960s, publishers decided that old-fashioned children’s books — the kinds with large-type print and colorful photographic illustrations — were passé. Led by Waldo Hunt and Bennett Cerf, they revived the 19th-century concept of pop-up books, which allowed young readers to create three-dimensional worlds by simply pulling a tab or turning a page. Their guiding belief was that these books were more interactive and thus more engaging to young readers. While that may be true, it fails to address a crucial point: Many, if not most, children’s books are meant to be ... Read More
Great Expectations Create the Best Teen Scholars
July 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
"Cut that cell phone umbilical cord, and push those kids out of the nest!" may be the zeitgeist message to parents of teenagers, but research shows the opposite: Kids do better when their parents stay involved with them during their teenage years and even throughout college. In his book Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-parenting, Carl Honoré skewers parents with chapter headings such as "It's the Adults, Stupid" and "Leave those Kids Alone." "Leave them alone" is likewise Tom Hodgkinson's rallying cry in The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising ... Read More
