Education officials will re-examine standardized testing in the U.S. due to growing complaints from the public. The general consensus is that students pre-kindergarten to 12th grade are taking too many exams.
Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools recently said, “Testing is an important part of education, and of life. But it’s time that we step back and see if the tail is wagging the dog.” The Council of Great city schools represents 67 urban school systems.
The Council of Chief State School Officers, which represents education commissioners in every state, has also joined in on the effort.
Teachers have always administered tests; but exams became a federal mandate in 2002 under the No Child Left Behind Act. It requires states to test students annually in math and reading, starting in grades 3 through 8 and ending with high school.
In the past two years, four states have delayed or repealed graduation testing requirements. Four other states, including Texas, where the idea of using these tests began, have reduced the number of exams required or decreased their consequences.
In addition to federally required tests, states have added on more assessments, many that mandate exams such as an exit test to graduate high school.
On average, students in large urban school districts take 113 standardized tests between pre-K and 12th grade.
The number of standardized tests that U.S. students take is too high. While I feel that the idea to use tests to hold schools accountable is a good one, the frequency and redundancy of standardized testing has gone too far. It is essential to measure student achievement, but I hope that further analysis of standardized testing will lead to ways to relieve some of the burden that these tests bring to our students.
Across the nation schools are trying to locate and hire qualified special education teachers. The open positions are abundant and many teachers are not equipped to handle the challenges this difficult job presents. Schools often settle for inexperienced or under qualified candidates who may not last even a year or two.
The Lee Pesky Learning Center, in conjunction with Boise State University, believes that adequate teacher preparation can make all the difference. This nonprofit organization is working to overcome the teacher shortage by preparing individuals for the unique demands and challenges of working with special needs students.
The Pesky Center in Boiseprovides one-on-one instruction for special needs students after school hours, studying with an “education specialist.” Students of all ages come to work on anything from multiplication to reading comprehension with a mentor. Attention is placed on instructional components, how the student is responding and if goals are being achieved.
Founded in 1997, The Pesky Center was established to help students with learning disabilities. At the moment, the most pressing issue is locating and developing quality special education instructors. The center is helping to address this teacher shortage with a new training program. Students working toward a master’s in teaching at Boise State can apply to spend one year at the center as an instructor, while taking classes. The training and classes of this Special Education Collaborative program are covered by a scholarship from the founders of the center, Alan and Wendy Pesky.
Over the coming years, the hope is to grow the program and train even more teachers on the intricacies of working with special needs students. Professional development opportunities and training programs such as this will only help to tackle the special education teacher shortage by equipping educators with the skills necessary to be successful in their profession long-term.
When are children “ready” for school? There is much debate about when the transition between play-based pre-school and the start of “formal” schooling should begin. The trend in the UK primary school curriculum over recent decades has been towards an earlier start to formal instruction, and an erosion of learning through play.
But the evidence from international comparisons and psychological research of young children’s development all points to the advantages of a later start to formal instruction, particularly in relation to literacy.
Among the earliest in Europe
Children in England are admitted into reception classes in primary schools at age four; in many cases, if their birthdays are in the summer months, when they have only just turned four. This is in stark contrast to the vast majority of other European countries, many of which currently enjoy higher levels of educational achievement. In Europe, the most common school starting age is six, and even seven in some cases such as Finland.
European Commission. EURYDICE and EUROSTAT 2013. * Although education is not compulsory until six in Ireland, approx. 40% of four-year-olds and almost all five-year-olds are in publicly-funded primary schools.
From the moment children in England enter the reception class, the pressure is on for them to learn to read, write and do formal written maths. In many schools, children are identified as “behind” with reading before they would even have started school in many other countries. Now the government is introducing tests for four-year-olds soon after starting school.
There is no research evidence to support claims from government that “earlier is better”. By contrast, a considerable body of evidence clearly indicates the crucial importance of play in young children’s development, the value of an extended period of playful learning before the start of formal schooling, and the damaging consequences of starting the formal learning of literacy and numeracy too young.
Importance of play
A range of anthropological studies of children’s play in hunter-gatherer societies and other evolutionary psychology studies of play in the young of mammals have identified play as an adaptation which evolved in early human social groups, enabling humans to become powerful learners and problem-solvers.
Some neuroscientists’ research has supported this view of play as a central mechanism in learning. One book by Sergio and Vivien Pellis reviewed many other studies to show that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human, higher mental functions.
A range of experimental psychology studies, including my own work, have consistently demonstrated the superior learning and motivation arising from playful as opposed to instructional approaches to learning in children.
There are two crucial processes which underpin this relationship. First, playful activity has been shown to support children’s early development of representational skills, which is fundamental to language use. One 2006 study by US academics James Christie and Kathleen Roskos, reviewed evidence that a playful approach to language learning offers the most powerful support for the early development of phonological and literacy skills.
Second, through all kinds of physical, social and constructional play, such as building with blocks or making models with household junk, children develop their skills of intellectual and emotional “self-regulation”. This helps them develop awareness of their own mental processes – skills that have been clearly demonstrated to be the key predictors of educational achievement and a range of other positive life outcomes.
Longer-term impacts
Within educational research, a number of longitudinal studies have provided evidence of long-term outcomes of play-based learning. A 2002 US study by Rebecca Marcon, for example, demonstrated that by the end of their sixth year in school, children whose pre-school model had been academically-directed achieved significantly lower marks in comparison to children who had attended child-initiated, play-based pre-school programmes.
A number of other studies have specifically addressed the issue of the length of pre-school play-based experience and the age at which children begin to be formally taught the skills of literacy and numeracy. In a 2004 longitudinal study of 3,000 children funded by the department of education itself, Oxford’s Kathy Sylva and colleagues showed that an extended period of high-quality, play-based pre-school education made a significant difference to academic learning and well-being through the primary school years. They found a particular advantage for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Studies in New Zealand comparing children who began formal literacy instruction at age five or age seven have shown that by the age of 11 there was no difference in reading ability level between the two groups. But the children who started at five developed less positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those children who had started later.
This evidence, directly addressing the consequences of the introduction of early formal schooling, combined with the evidence on the positive impact of extended playful experiences, raises important questions about the current direction of travel of early childhood education policy in England.
There is an equally substantial body of evidence concerning the worrying increase in stress and mental health problems among children in England and other countries where early childhood education is being increasingly formalised. It suggests there are strong links between these problems and a loss of playful experiences and increased achievement pressures. In the interests of children’s educational achievements and their emotional well-being, the UK government should take this evidence seriously.
Hard Evidenceis a series of articles in which academics use research evidence to tackle the trickiest questions.
David Whitebread, Senior Lecturer in Psychology & Education, University of Cambridge
The recent horrifying spectacle of a disturbed student fatally stabbing his teacher in front of his classmates in Leeds has spurred a national dialogue about how schools should address violence.
Perhaps the most controversial measure under consideration is expanding the use of knife arches – known in the US as walk-through metal detectors. Given metal detectors’ longevity in some US schools (since 1992 in Chicago’s high schools), the number of studies that have assessed their effectiveness is abysmally low.
In the UK, teacher union leaders and the deputy prime minister have rejected the idea of more knife arches. Their opposition to this expensive technology is understandable given that armed violence is extremely rare in UK schools. Responsible policy-making is driven by patterns and sound cost-benefit analysis rather than the uproar over single tragic incidents.
But such a proposal may resonate in the minority of schools where the risk of violent threats and victimisation are more than remote. Some students in these schools reportedly arm themselves for protection and their next minor altercation could (but rarely does) escalate into serious violence.
In these jurisdictions, police and school officials may employ knife arches in order to signal that safety is a top priority, while raising awareness about the dangers that knives pose. But do knife arches promote the aims that matter most to students, parents, and teachers? Do they make schools safer? Do they alter the school climate in a manner that promotes students learning?
The answer to these questions surely depends, in part, on how the knife arches are employed. Arches, when deployed in the UK, are used sporadically – around one day, gone the next. Confronted with this temporary barrier, most knife-toting students will either ditch the weapon or ditch school (assuming smuggling the knife through a window or side entrance is not a realistic possibility). These potential assailants can be quite confident (and their potential victims reasonably concerned) that no knife arch will impede their next attempt.
Lessons from US schools
Whereas the limited capacity of sporadic knife arches to act as a deterrent seems obvious, you can reasonably predict that more frequent use would substantially enhance this capacity.
In the USA, as in the UK, opposition to metal detectors is intense and largely successful across the socio-economic spectrum. But there are some schools – predictably comprised largely of urban youth of colour – where the lockdown environments feared by campaigners in the UK are a daily reality.
In 2010, an exhaustive meta-analysis of studies on metal detectors, either deployed alone or combined with other fortification strategies, uncovered no studies that compared student outcomes before and after installation.
Among the five studies that compare student safety measures (all self-reported) in schools with and without metal detectors, only one reflects positively on metal detectors. This 1992 study involved students who attended three sampled New York City high schools that scanned their students at random with hand-held metal detectors approximately once a week. They were 43%-49% less likely than students of twelve other high schools to report carrying weapons inside or en-route to school (even though they were equally likely to carry them at other times).
Fear remains
But reducing weapons possession is of limited benefit unless it translates into reduced violence or fear. Collectively these five studies and a subsequent one from Rutgers University suggest that metal detectors fail to reduce threats, fighting, fear, and perceptions of violence and disorder. Injuries and deaths resulting from smuggled weapons are so uncommon that any benefits are likely to elude statistical detection.
The apparent failure of metal detectors to reduce fear is especially disappointing, because fear reduction is the most promising pathway through which metal detectors may improve academic performance.
Frequent and effective scanning requires a large investment of time and money, and it inevitably widens the net of surveillance. The thousands of hours that students collectively spend waiting in line to be scanned are hours that could have been spent engaging academically.
The money spent on arches and their operation is money that could have been spent on programmes that address the needs, struggles, fears, and hopes that students carry through the school doors, gates, and arches each day.
The cloud-based communications solution will strengthen responsiveness and track response time to stakeholders throughout the state
(HERNDON, VA)January 14, 2016 – K12 Insighttoday announced a statewide implementation of Let’s Talk!, its cloud-based communications solution, by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI). The department is using Let’s Talk! to create a culture of two-way communications between state education officials and community members, be it parents, teachers, students, taxpayers, or staff. Feedback submitted through Let’s Talk!, accessible through a button on the department’s website, is automatically routed to the right state department official for a timely response. On the backend, the department is leveraging the information and data collected through individual conversations to inform decision-making and better serve local communities.
The NCDPI is also using Let’s Talk! to track Freedom of Information Act and public records requests, and to manage its social media interactions so that parents, teachers, and students have a more controlled, reliable way to communicate feedback. The goal is to strengthen the department’s responsiveness and ensure the community gets the information it needs—and gets it in way that they can use it.
“Customer service is important to the Department of Public Instruction, and Let’s Talk! is a helpful tool to make sure we are serving the public in a timely way,” said State Superintendent June Atkinson. “Public schools have many customers and stakeholders, including parents, students, employers, higher education, and educators, so it is helpful to track our interactions with all of our customers to be sure we provide the service they need.”
Let’s Talk! works with more than 30,000 school administrators across the country, but this is the first time a statewide system has adopted the solution.
“We’re extremely excited for the opportunity to partner with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction,” said K12 Insight Founder and CEO Suhail Farooqui. “State Superintendent Atkinson is committed to providing parents and community members across the state with top-notch customer service. Let’s Talk! gives every stakeholder an opportunity to directly reach DPI staff with comments and ask questions.”
About the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction provides leadership to 115 local public school districts and 160 charter schools serving over 1.5 million students in kindergarten through high school graduation. The agency is responsible for all aspects of the state’s public school system and works under the direction of the North Carolina State Board of Education.
About K12 Insight K12 Insight, based in Herndon, VA, works with more than 30,000 school administrators to strengthen the relationships that power education. Our custom solutions combine technology, research, and expert training to help school leaders build trust and drive positive change in their local communities. Learn more at K12Insight.com.
About Let’s Talk!
Let’s Talk! is a cloud-based communications solution that helps K12 school- and district-level administrators identify opportunities for engagement, manage potential crises, and build stronger relationships with parents, teachers, students, community members, and staff. Manage all of your inbound and outbound school communications from one location and stay connected with your community from wherever you are with our always-on mobile app. Learn more at K12insight.com/lets-talk.
Malala Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban in 2012 for speaking out in support of girls’ education in Pakistan. Since then, based in the UK, she has continued her advocacy. She is the youngest-ever Nobel laureate: when it was awarded last year, she was just 17.
No doubt, then, that Malala, who grew up in Pakistan’s Swat valley and went on to inspire the world, is a truly remarkable young woman. But He Named Me Malala tells her personal story, whilst also shining a light on the wider global issue of the systematic exclusion of children, and especially girls, from education.
David Guggenheim’s documentary captures Malala’s everyday life as both a young teenager and a global activist through poignant and often humorous interview scenes. Malala is followed around her home, through school, to television interviews and global summits to spread her message of educational equality.
There are also hard-hitting clinical reconstructions of Malala’s emergency surgery in the UK after she was shot, brashly juxtaposed with the animated depiction of her upbringing in the Swat Valley. The dreamy style of these animations works well to capture the nostalgia of a life to which Malala and her family can no longer return.
Malala’s distinctiveness and bravery is reinforced by the way the film plays off the many juxtapositions of her life – voice and silence, empowerment and oppression, the triumph over tragedy. In so doing, it blends together a palpable sense of injustice with an unwavering commitment to hope. Malala speaks eloquently about everything from her favourite books and film stars to world politics. Her personal experience of suffering, however, remains wrapped in stoic silence.
Seemingly inconsequential, but touching moments of quotidian family life do well to pull you in emotionally to the heart-warming experiences of the Yousafzai family, who now live in the UK. Her relationship with her father, the “he” of the film’s title, is particularly focused on. Ordinary portraits of Malala’s giggling girlish coyness and childish banter with her brothers are a welcome reprise from the film’s prodigal tendencies. Indeed, these moments are crucial: they undercut the propensity of the film to romanticise Malala’s heroism. It is the very ordinariness of Malala’s everyday life, contrasted with the unnerving tenacity of her speeches to the UN, that pulls the rug from under our awe-inspired feet.
These touching moments are also important in the way they disrupt stereotypical imaginations of the “Islamic Other”, so often portrayed negatively in mainstream cinema and the media. The value of this simple depiction of a Muslim family being like any other family living in the UK cannot be overstated.
Malala and director David Guggenheim. 20th Century Fox
At the same time, many other wider political concerns are only hinted at. Nuggets of insight, such as Malala’s father’s claim that “the Taliban is not a person. It is an ideology”, certainly give the film a political flavour but could have been delved into in more detail.
Similarly, a 30-second clip of some Pakistani men agreeing with the Taliban’s threat to shoot Malala should she return is interesting, but also warranted more attention, particularly because it could have helped the audience better understand the everyday Pakistani perspective.
While this certainly makes for a good story, I couldn’t help but wonder about the voices of the people – in particular, the young girls – living back in Pakistan. Although the film uses Malala’s experience as a prism for thinking about the injustice of a lack of education globally, it may have been a more powerful argument for social change if the film had spent more time examining the reality of those left behind.
But despite this small niggle, He Named me Malala is a very important film. It does the crucial job of sharing the exceptional story of an exceptional young woman with a wider audience. And as an accomplished narrative of a heroic girl standing for what she believes in, it can do no wrong. But it is the moments of ordinariness that give the film real traction.
It is these moments that inspire and show us that any person, anywhere, can muster a voice. And a powerful, revolutionary one at that.
A new study has found an increase in nutritional school lunches and other meals since the implementation Michelle Obama’s Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
In 2012 when the healthier food standards were implemented, naysayers voiced concern that fewer students would eat the school lunch. A new study has dismantled those ideas and found that meals have become more nutritionally wholesome and students are still eating them.
The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) was signed into law in 2010 and it called for larger portions of whole grains, vegetables and fruits. The nutritional school lunches also saw a reduction in calories found in lunches and breakfasts served at school.
Nutritional school lunches being eaten, too
In a report published earlier this month in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, a study from the University of Washington Nutritional Sciences Program found that the new, healthier meal standards have really impacted the quality of meals served at schools.
The scientists compared data collected in the 16 months before the standards went into effect with data collected in the 15 months after the implementation of the new standards. They examined the nutritional value of 1.7 million school meals that were picked out by 7,200 kids from an urban area in Washington. The findings showed that the presence of six nutrients went up: iron, protein, fiber, calcium, Vitamin A, and Vitamin C.
The researchers write that these changes can be attributed primarily to the increased servings of fruits and vegetables in the nutritional school lunch standards.
Donna B. Johnson, lead author and a professor at the University of Washington, admits limits in their research and includes the fact that the study analyzed food that students chose, not what they consumed. She points out that plate waste has not risen since the changes of HHFKA took place — a huge finding that contradicts those who say school lunches are simply not being eaten as a result of HHFKA.
Other data is expected to come forward in the next year to confirm or negate this study’s findings on nutrition progress.
Pre-recession spending levels are back in California. Well, at least California education funding has returned to pre-recession levels. Students are seeing the same funding to their schools that existed before the housing crash of 2008.
According to Sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com, “[s]oaring tax revenues have carried per-pupil education spending in California beyond where it stood before the Great Recession.”
But is California education funding really improving?
On the surface that seems to be awesome news as state legislatures had cut California education funding in the face of budget cutbacks and dwindling tax coffers.
But as information posted via Redding.com points out, the funding is still not enough. California education funding is still in the bottom 10 of states when it comes to adequately resourcing students and schools. Getting back to pre-recession levels is nothing to celebrate; it’s just a starting point for what needs to be funding reform for the education in the state.
It will also be interesting to watch how quickly funding could expire as economies continue to grow. The marker is that California’s tax revenue seems to be healthy again, but we’re basing that off of money accumulated nearly 10 years ago. If we adjusted the funding based on what is actually being earned, and taxed, today this news may not seem so rosy.
What’s honestly the most surprising is that it has taken this long for the levels to return to 2007 levels. We should have seen this news in 2011 or 2012. It’s still not enough though rising education funding is something worth praising.
Even with that bit of information, new money, or old money dependent upon how one views it, is good. More investment for education isn’t a bad thing. I just hope that California education funding continues to grow so its students see better appropriation in their state.
If you’re a teacher helping ELL students succeed in regular education classrooms, there are a few things you must consider.
First, you need to educate yourself about the language acquisition process. You should also contextualize learning so that content is relevant to students’ experiences with their families. And most importantly, don’t allow the language barrier to interfere with a belief that ELL students can learn. You can’t underestimate the power of high expectations when it comes to success with language development (and learning in general). As a teacher, you should be willing to learn about ELL students, their families, and their communities, to structure meaningful learning experiences.
Use technology, including recordings, videos, and presentations, to emphasize language concepts. Students should be allowed to demonstrate their language acquisition through dramatization or video, with subtitles in their native language.
Some programs endorse the use of translation devices or electronic dictionaries in the classroom. However, there is some debate as to whether or not these forms of assistive technology actually defeat the purpose of English language learning.
Another less-considered idea is to include ELL students’ families and communities in the learning process. For example, you can host presentations or entertainment nights so students can show parents what they’ve learned. The community can be included as a means for support by inviting bilingual guests to share their language-learning experiences with students. ELL students will learn that language is a challenge for everyone and that learning a second language becomes a valuable, admirable skill. Cooperative and collaborative learning can also be effective. Many ELL students learn best in small-group discussions where there is less pressure to speak perfectly. Introducing the entire class to a third language might be beneficial, to help instill empathy for the new language learners.
Visual aids also support learning among ELL students. These include nonverbal behavior such as pointing, body language, signals, and gestures, as well as photos, videos, and dramatizations. ELL students should be encouraged to use graphic organizers and to keep picture journals of the words they have learned. Writing journals and learning logs also support learning among ELL students. Also helpful are alternative versions of texts or novels and teacher-provided notes for lectures or presentations.
I hope these tips are useful for taking part in ELL students’ success. Do you have any other tips that will help ELL students learn best in a school setting? Please leave your thoughts below.
What students desire from their school experience is not necessarily what their parents and members of the larger community want them to learn or experience. Only a small percentage of students come to school with an overwhelming desire to learn. Many attend school on a daily basis because that is simply what they are supposed to do. That doesn’t mean they don’t end up finding subjects they enjoy, but American students do not make the active choice to begin attending school.
So teachers come to the table already behind, in some ways. Not only is it the job of educators to teach, but they must also find ways to make the learning process enjoyable and desirable to students who didn’t make the choice to be in the classroom in the first place. With authentic lessons and inquiry learning, educators can clear this hurdle, though. Here are a few ways how:
1. Seek feedback. To assist in motivating students, schools could put out a survey asking them what they want to learn, what they have already learned, and what the teacher could do to make learning more exciting. With the stress of standardized tests, it might be difficult to take the time out of the day to distribute the survey, but every effort should be made to do so.
2. Create safety. Students are more prone to become engaged in assignments when the teacher has created a safe and inviting learning environment. Students want to work in an educational environment where a teacher’s expectations are explicitly outlined. In order to be successful, students must be given the opportunity to engage in activities just above their abilities.
3. Prioritize learning. It may seem like a smart idea to entertain students to motivate them, but solid learning is always the best path. The teacher also has an obligation to create a teaching environment that promotes learning. This means, for example, that teachers should not embarrass students for a wrong answer or a below-standard test score—nor should they allow other students to make fun of wrong answers and below-standard test scores. We need to make sure that the debate on the quality of American schools focuses on the academic practices directly affecting student learning.
4. Strive for equality. Schools are not only concerned with test scores, but are also concerned with equality. All students should be considered equal, regardless of their age, race, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, cultural beliefs, and ability levels. If all students feel they are being treated equally, then they will be more motivated to work. Students will feel intrinsically motivated to learn when they feel respected by teachers and the staff, and will work harder to achieve the goals that teachers and schools have outlined.
5. Consider outside support systems. Student-teacher and family-student relationships also influence intrinsic motivation. In order for students to perform well in school, they will need to have the proper support system both in school and at home. Most students are only interested in performing for the people that matter most to them. If these people do not hold education in high regard, then the student will not hold education in high regard either.
When students are in the elementary grades, they will usually perform for their parents and for their teachers with little to no resistance. Once students develop social networks, parents and teachers are quickly replaced by peers. Adolescents are prone to peer pressure and succumb easily to their peers’ suggestions and viewpoints. It is important for high school teachers to create strong student-teacher relationships, in order to more effectively motivate the students to remain engaged in behaviors that lead to positive academic achievement and outcomes.
6. Encourage collaboration. It is also important for teachers to create and support opportunities for students to collaborate with others. Schools and teachers that create the high levels of student engagement understand the possibilities learning group collaboration affords. Teachers can also provide opportunities students to collaborate with students in other countries. Collaboration among students in and outside the classroom will have to be closely facilitated by the teacher. If carried out appropriately, outcomes for this strategy can be very positive for all students concerned.
Why is it so important to have motivated students?
Student engagement is one of the potential indicators of the effectiveness of a school. Educators and administrators have to concentrate their efforts on activities that engage students in order to foster academic achievement. If they do not, they will have a room full of students who are either academically disengaged or who are merely giving the impression that they are academically engaged. Students are less likely to pay attention when they are on board with what is being taught.
If students complete a task they feel is boring, then they do so to comply with the teacher’s directions, and not because they are intrinsically motivated to do so. In too many instances, students operate from a point of extrinsic motivation, sadly to include the motivation to avoid being singled out or to incurring the teacher’s wrath. If school is not fun and exciting, students won’t develop the love of learning—leaving them less likely to move on to higher education.
What do you think are some ways to get students excited to learn? Share your insights and experiences in the comments below.
