Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Do (Cheap) Mid-Century Schoolhouses Worsen Disasters Like the Moore Tornado?

May 22, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
moore-tornado

Over the past 24 hours, focus has turned to everything from Oklahoma's economy to its geology to its plains culture to explain why the devastated suburb of Moore didn't have "safe room" shelters in its buildings, including two destroyed elementary schools where at least seven children died. But what about the school structures themselves? "I'm told these schools were built in the 1960s," said Bill Coulbourne, a structural engineer with the American Society of Civil Engineers. Coulbourne oversaw teams assessing damage after Moore's previous tornado disaster in 1999. He was on-scene ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Background Music Reduces Playground Bullying

April 24, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
bullying-soccer

Can music soothe the savage sixth grader? Perhaps, according to a first-of-its-kind study from Israel, which finds that gentle melodies may help deter schoolyard bullying. “If the findings of this pilot study are replicated and can be generalized," researchers Naomi Ziv and Einat Dolev write in the journal Children and Schools, "they point to a very simple, inexpensive method of reducing aggressive behavior.” The three-week experiment featured 56 students—32 boys and 24 girls—at a local elementary school in the north of Israel. All were either 11 or 12 years old. For the ... Read More

More like this: Education, Findings
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Ditch Day Economics: California Schools Paying $35 a Day, Per Kid

October 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

In my coworker's email this morning, from the school principal: Hi parents. My sources have told me that seniors are planning a ditch day tomorrow. I hope that is not the case because ditch days are considered unexcused absences and everyone who participates in a ditch day, tomorrow, or any other day, will be issued a Saturday School that must be served before graduation in June. Unexcused absences cost our district roughly $35 a day for each student who ditches. In this economy we cannot afford to lose any money. We have a senior picnic in May that is meant to give seniors a day to ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Chicago Teachers’ Strike: What Do We Want? Better Management Gurus Might Help

September 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Chicago Teachers Union Strike

The Chicago teachers’ strike, which is now entering its second week, represents more than a simple dispute about pay and benefits, as many observers have noted. It’s more like a gauntlet thrown down against the entire education reform agenda—the broad centrist policy movement that seeks to bring merit pay, metrics, pink slips for underperformance, and other business school concepts to the American schoolhouse. Indeed, one of the main sticking points in the dispute is Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s desire to tie a substantial part of teachers’ professional evaluations—as much as 40 ... Read More

More like this: Education
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Public Schools Good for People Without Kids, Too

February 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Few things ignite a community quite like this question: if you don’t have children in the local public schools, should you have to help pay for those schools? Tax exemptions for specific demographic groups like senior citizens, for example, are often rationalized as lightening the burden on residents who don’t benefit from public schools. When school bond measures fail across the country, it’s often a sign of torn communities unsure of who should foot the bill for new investments in education (although maintaining existing facilities seems to be more palatable). Opponents of such ... Read More

More like this: Education, The Idea Lobby
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Learning to Read When a School System Falters

February 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Dolan and Moustafa

On a hot, sunny September afternoon — the sticky kind so common in New York City that time of year — a tall, dark-haired young man with his shoulders hunched slightly forward padded into Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School’s back entrance and into a small courtyard. Moustafa Elhanafi sought the school’s principal. He needed her help. Not being a student there, he didn’t know what she looked like or where he would find her inside the massive, unfamiliar building. In the courtyard beneath the shade of a wide-leafed tree, looking for crafty students cutting class, stood Principal ... Read More

More like this: Education
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No Debate: Kids Can Learn By Arguing

January 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Let’s not “agree to disagree,” says Deanna Kuhn. The Columbia University professor of psychology and education wants to bring back serious debate in America — in sixth grade, if not sooner. Kuhn is tired of hearing that people have a right to their own opinion. It’s too easy to fall into thinking that all opinions are equal, she says, and “so why bother?” The country needs citizens who can make logical arguments “based on substantive claims, sound reasoning, and relevant evidence,” she writes. That’s language from the new educational standards for middle school, adopted ... Read More

More like this: Education, January-February 2012
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Poor Neighborhoods Mean Fewer High School Grads

October 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

"There's a lot of talk about how we live in a post-racial society, but that certainly isn't true," says Geoffrey Wodtke, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies the effects of growing up in the bad part of town. He and two other researchers tracked 2,100 children from age 1 to age 17, and they report that children growing up in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and unemployment are much less likely to graduate from high school. While the results may seem expected, much of the previous research in the field had taken only snapshot measurements of such "neighborhood ... Read More

More like this: Education
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Do Principals Know Good Teaching When They See It?

September 24, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

It’s happened hundreds of times. An audience of principals, superintendents and instructional coaches is shown a short videotape of a classroom lesson and asked to score it from 1 to 5. It would seem straightforward: The teacher is good, bad or somewhere in-between. But invariably, the scores come in all over the map, with high and low in fairly equal numbers. Having toured the United States with those videotapes, two leaders of the University of Washington’s Center for Educational Leadership conclude that most school leaders can’t identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, ... Read More

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‘American Teacher’ Argues for Increasing Salaries

September 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Think teaching is a highly respected profession? Think again. A recent ranking of the top 200 jobs in America, based on such criteria as income, physical demands and stress, had public school teaching at a dismal 100 — and nearly 10 spots below teacher's aide. "Our society doesn't value the teaching profession as it should," says Ninive Calegari, one of the producers of American Teacher, a documentary film opening around the country beginning at the end of this month. "We tolerate incredible turnover and bad salaries. People think the job is easy because good teachers make it look ... Read More

More like this: Education, Moving Pictures
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