I have long been a proponent of year-round schooling. In the past, I have often discussed why I feel that teachers should get behind the push to support year-round schooling and how more consistent time in the classroom will lead to higher student performance, boosting teacher accountability ratings and accommodating a much more streamlined education process. But is it really worth up-ending the school system as we know it?
Let’s look at some reasons to be concerned about changing from our traditional summers-off calendar to a year-round schooling model.
1. It could end up being more expensive.
The summer months are typically the highest ones for energy consumption. In fact, the average electricity bill for homeowners in the summer months goes up 4 to 8 percent. Having empty classrooms in the summer months means less money going out to air conditioning and prevents other warm-weather costs from hitting school utility budgets. It may seem like a minor point, but an increase in utility bills for one-quarter of the year really could hurt schools’ bottom lines.
2. The children won’t have enough down time.
Some childhood development experts believe that particularly when it comes to younger students, time off in the summer months is a vital component of healthy development. The argument follows that kids are not designed to spend so much of their time inside classroom walls and that the warmer, pleasant weather of the summer provides a perfect opportunity to get outside and experience childhood.
There’s a big problem with this argument, though. It’s that most children these days are not spending their summers frolicking in fields of flowers or running around their neighborhoods, hanging out with other kids.
The days of kids spending their summers outside, communing with nature and getting plenty of exercise, are long gone. A recent Harvard University study found that school-age children tend to gain weight at a faster pace during the summer months than during the school year, a fact attributed to more time spent in sedentary activities like watching television or using mobile devices instead of being outside or participating in active pursuits. Now, not only must K-12 students relearn the academic items, but they must also shift their mentalities from less-active, sedentary ones to sharp, alert learning models – and teachers face the brunt of this responsibility.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reports that by the time children graduate from high school, they will have spent more time watching television than in classrooms. What’s more – children who watch an excessive amount of television generally have lower grades in school, read fewer books and have more health problems. While some children visit summer camps, or attend child care when school is out, others stay at home, inside, with not much else to do than watch TV or play games on electronic devices. This is especially true for kids who are middle-school age or higher and are able to stay home alone when parents work. The “down time” of the summer months is really just empty time, often void of anything academically or developmentally advantageous.
3. There might be some scheduling issues caused by the calendar change.
For parents with children of different ages and in different schools, a year-round schedule could present serious scheduling issues. This argument assumes that schools would actually adhere to different time off schedules – something that seemingly could be adjusted so that all schools within a particular district or geographic area were on the same schedule. There is also the child care debate that says it would be difficult for working parents to find babysitters for one or two weeks at a time every few months, as opposed to three months straight in the summer. Again though, the market adjusts with demand and it seems to me that child care centers and camps would offer programs when students needed them. Just because those programs are not available now does not mean they would not exist when families were willing to pay for them.
The most common arguments against year-round schooling seem like a stretch. They reek more of the fear of change rather than actual concern. They are based on ungrounded assumptions and are simply not strong enough to stand against the reasons we should adopt a year-round schooling model here in the United States.
What arguments against year-round schooling do you hear? What ones do you agree with?
After the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey, one of the first actions of the Turkish state and government was to purge thousands of academics and deans from office.
In a crackdown that rapidly spread across civil and military services, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the closure of thousands of private schools and many universities. Some 15,000 employees at the education ministry were fired, while more than 1,500 university deans were asked to resign.
So, why did Turkey’s government go after academics, and how were they able to force so many to resign?
I am a sociologist who grew up in Turkey and went through its university system. Even after moving to the United States, I have been in close contact with academia in Turkey – organizing many academic events with Turkish universities and collaborating with faculty.
I believe that the answer to the above question lies in the unique design of the institutions of higher education in Turkey.
Let’s start with history
Soon after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, a law bringing all educational institutions under state control was promulgated.
Prior to that – in the Ottoman Empire – Western-style institutions of higher education established by the state, by Western missionaries and non-Muslim minorities as well as by religious institutions (medrese) had coexisted.
But, in the newly established republic, the control of all institutions, including institutions of higher education, came to rest with the Republican elite.
Most of the faculty were treated by the state and its governments as state officials. The faculty too often regarded themselves as such. In fact, to this day, they are even issued different color passports to mark their distinction from ordinary citizens.
State control over universities had always been substantial, but with this action, it got institutionalized. For even though the HEI, like the judiciary, was in name fully independent, appointments to the HEI were overseen and approved by the state.
For instance, while university faculty voted to elect their chairs, directors, deans and presidents, the appointment of university presidents was contingent on the approval of the president of the Turkish Republic and the appointment of deans contingent upon the approval of HEI.
Opening up Turkey’s markets
In 1984, Turkey began a process of economic liberalization. Turkish elites started to gradually transform the state-controlled economy into a market-centered one. That ended the period of dominance of state-run universities.
There are 193 universities in Turkey today. Murad Sezer/Reuters
Today, there are about 193 universities in Turkey, of which 109 are state universities and 84 private. The private universities in Turkey were established either by wealthy individuals or private foundations.
I would argue that these private universities weakened state control over education – especially research and faculty recruitment. As they did not receive public funds, the internal administration of these universities was somewhat less influenced by the state.
These private universities also strengthened civil society: More faculty came to be involved in education, research and teaching courses that stimulated students to think differently. The faculty could now openly design courses that tackled Turkey’s problems, such as a critical analyses of Turkish nationalism and culture on the one side, and domestic violence and gender issues on the other.
Despite this change, state influence on private universities was still visible to many of us in academia. For example, we would hear about the pressure from the Turkish state to hire former state bureaucrats as faculty and to host conferences where people with particular pro-government views were invited.
So, while all universities and also the HEI were autonomous bodies – just like the judiciary – that was not how things worked in practice.
AKP and academic control
When the Justice and Development Party (AKP) initially came to power, it did take some steps to address some of the problems in higher education. For example, the ban on women wearing veils on campuses was lifted and funding for scientific research was substantially increased. The tenure process was made more fair and less arbitrary.
However, all universities, including private universities, continued to be under the constant scrutiny of HEI. And checks on academic freedom continued.
For example, when the the German Parliament passed the Armenian Genocide resolution anonymously on June 2, 2016, university presidents came under pressure to issue public statements supporting Turkish foreign policy.
To this day, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – in which a million Armenians lost their lives – remains a highly sensitive issue in Turkey. This issue is similar to Turkey’s ongoing conflict with Kurds. Public discussions of such issues have always been problematic.
Connection of state and knowledge
It is a truism that knowledge is power. Those who control knowledge have ultimate power in a society. Since educational institutions are among the most significant places for research, their control becomes crucial in autocratic states. Rulers want to closely monitor access to knowledge and therefore to power.
Scholar Büşra Ersanlı, a political scientist studying the connection between between state and knowledge in Turkey, points out how the Turkish state has constantly taken measures to imbue all school textbooks with nationalist discourse glorifying the state.
Supporters of Gulen movement shout slogans. Osman Orsal/Reuters
Schools and campuses are regarded as sites of potential social change in Turkey.
In this context, it is no accident that the Gülen movement – launched by a Muslim cleric with the professed intent to improve first Turkish civil society and then humankind – started by providing K-12 and higher education to those in Turkey and abroad.
The movement, which today has gained extraordinary influence is allegedly behind the failed coup attempt in Turkey. To this day, it operates thousands of schools throughout the world, including the United States.
President Erdoğan too used schools to start a revival movement in Sunni Islamic studies. At one time, in fact, both President Erdogan and Islamic scholar Gulen were considered to be allies.
Stranglehold over academia
The current Turkish government’s stranglehold over academia started in 2013 when Erdoğan, who had been prime minister was elected president.
Over the past three years, human rights in Turkey have been increasingly curbed, although the president and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have continually denied any such restrictions.
University students protest against Turkey’s higher education board. Osman Orsal/Reuters
I personally felt his wrath in January 2016 when I signed a petition, along with thousands of like-minded academics, calling for the conflict with the Kurds to be solved by peaceful, not military, means.
The Turkish-Kurdish conflict has existed since the establishment of the Turkish Republic. Erdoğan himself started a peace process with the Kurds in 2011, while he was prime minister of Turkey. But after becoming president, he ordered military operations against them.
It was in this context that we protested the violence. Erdoğan’s response to our petition was emphatic:
“There is no difference between a terrorist with a gun and bomb in his hand and those who use their work and pen to support terror. The fact that an individual could be a deputy, an academic, an author, a journalist or the director of an NGO [nongovernmental organization] does not change the fact that that person is a terrorist.”
Having formed a Listserv, we signatories were still trying to decide how to resist this violence wreaked upon us when the new wave of purges commenced.
Where will Turkey go next?
I, for one, have decided not to travel to my country of origin this summer for the first time ever for fear of arrest.
Where will Turkey go from here? I spend many sleepless nights, feeling just as I did when I first read George Orwell’s “1984.” Just like Orwell’s dystopian society – a society with oppressive controls – the current Turkish state and the government are, it seems, out to silence all people capable of producing new and independent thinking and research in Turkey.
As most of such minds are concentrated in Turkish academia, they will all be destroyed unless they turn into obedient and pious consumers.
**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**
A guest column by Anita Ginsburg
Effective leadership is a combination of personality, skills and attitude. Although personality and people skills are important, leadership is primarily about attitude, values and experience. Students who develop strong personal values and positive attitudes become natural leaders because other people are moved by them.
Teaching Leadership Values
It is important to understand what real leadership is. A leader isn’t necessarily the boss or simply a person in power or a high-ranking position. True leadership is the ability to inspire others to take positive actions or make changes that they otherwise would not. The power of true leadership doesn’t come from authority. Rather, it comes from personal values the leader displays. The greatest leadership values are perseverance, commitment, excellence, a positive attitude and the ability to overcome adverse situations. Leaders see challenges instead of obstacles. They are always striving to move ahead and do their best, and they never give up on what they know is right.
Providing Broad Life and Community Experience
The more knowledge and experience a person has, the more they will be able to make smart decisions and examine differing viewpoints. The ability to show empathy and wisdom is another hallmark of great leaders. Great leaders tend to understand and respect the differences between people and discover ways to get people working together.
Discovering Interests and Passions
Most great leaders are driven by a passion for something. They are then able to ignite that passion in others who follow them. It is important for any student to find that special thing that drives them and piques their interest. Students often find their passions unexpectedly as they are introduced to new concepts or ideas. It is important to encourage students to explore and step outside of their comfort zones where they might find something they are passionate about.
Making the Right Social Connections
Few, if any, great leaders operated alone. Great achievements are often group efforts. Students that are able to make the right positive connections with both peers and role models are likely to be on the path toward success and leadership. It is important to encourage students to seek out people that will support them and help them grow and learn and to avoid people that pull them down or who don’t care about them.
Encouraging a Quality Educational Experience
A quality education gives young people the skills and information they need to be successful. This is especially true in terms of higher education. For example, a master’s of public policy online can provide students with all of the opportunities and values that help develop leadership. Students entering college may not know exactly what ignites their passions and they may not have all the right social connections. Mostly likely those students are still trying to gain quality experience and may be stepping far outside their comfort zones for the first time. The right college environment allows them to gain the experience, connections and skills they need to become the powerful and influential leaders of tomorrow.
Overall, being a good example of an effective leader and providing students with resources can help inspire them to be more influential leaders themselves.
The past few weeks have been full of several unfortunate violent events: the massacre in Orlando, the killing of black men by police officers, the sniper attack in Dallas, the Bastille Day attack in France, the violent coup attempt in Turkey and the shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
While many of us may not have been directly affected by these events, we watched the news as it unfolded on broadcast and social media. Witnessing such violence on media can take a severe toll on us even when our near and dear ones are not directly affected.
Surprisingly, what research is beginning to uncover is that impact on young children – especially young gifted children – can be worse.
Impact of violence on adults and children
A large body of research has demonstrated a link between exposure to violent media and aggression and violent behavior across multiple countries and cultures. A synthesis of this literature found different reactions in adults and children. The short-term impact of watching violence on screen was greater for adults, while the long-term effects were greater for children.
However, this impact can vary. We are researchers who study gifted children and violence. Although definitions of “gifted” vary, gifted children can be generally defined as those high in general intelligence as indicated by a standardized test score.
Based on this definition, gifted children tend to have many advantages. For example, higher intelligence is linked to greater achievement, motivation, memory, moral reasoning and development, social skills, sense of humor, educational and occupational attainment, leadership, and even creativity. Higher intelligence is also linked to lower impulsive behavior, delinquency and crime.
However, research also shows that higher intelligence is linked with greater emotional sensitivity. Scholars studying gifted children have argued that because of this, they are not necessarily advantaged in all contexts.
Studying the impact of violence on gifted kids
But what things might gifted children might be more sensitive to? One factor that might play a role is violence – even violence depicted in something as seemingly harmless as cartoons.
Along with Cengiz Altay, a doctoral student at Fatih University, we tested 74 “gifted” children and 70 children from Turkey who were “less gifted” or had relatively lower intelligence scores. The “gifted” group were those students scoring 130 or higher (top two percent) on the intelligence scale. The school from which these students were drawn had a gifted students unit and were initially screened for higher intelligence than the general population.
The study was conducted in 2015 over a period of half a year. At the time of the study, these children were 10 years old. We examined whether exposure to media containing violence compared to media that did not contain violence differently affected the verbal ability of children.
To do that, we asked all students to take a verbal test before (pre-test) and after (post-test) watching a video. Participants were asked to generate words from a different set of letters for both these tests.
The most common letters in the Turkish alphabet were randomly divided into two groups for the pre-test and post-test. In the pretest, participants were asked to generate words starting with the letters A, L, M, S, C, E, B and H. In the post-test, participants had to generate words starting with the letters I, D, N, O, F, K and T. They had one minute to list as many words as possible that began with the particular letters.
Between the pre-test and post-test, participants in both the gifted and less gifted groups were randomly assigned to watch either a nonviolent cartoon or a violent cartoon. We used two animation shows that are commonly watched by children.
Even animation series that depict violence can have an impact.Loren Javier, CC BY-ND
One was “Bakugan Battle Brawlers,” a series with episodes that depict violence in a battle, and the other “Arthur” – a story that revolves around the many friend and family issues of a young boy named Arthur. This latter series does not have any episodes of screen violence.
What our findings show
Our research, published recently in Gifted Child Quarterly, a leading journal on the study of giftedness, shows that children’s abilities could be negatively impacted by exposure to violence, especially gifted children.
We found that gifted students generated more words than the other students when they were asked to generate words prior to watching the video. However, the gifted students assigned to the video which showed violence generated slightly fewer words than the less gifted group after they had watched the video.
Conversely, when gifted students were shown the cartoon without violence, they outperformed the other students on both the pre-test and the post-test. This suggests that it was the violence in the cartoons that reduced the gifted students’ mental performance rather than simply watching a cartoon.
Overall, all kids under performed after watching the violence, but gifted kids showed a greater performance drop.
Scholars, however, have argued that it is a myth that gifted students don’t face problems and challenges. Our study adds to the evidence that gifted children do face disadvantages or challenges, specifically when it comes to exposure to screen violence. Violence in the media impact children generally, but our study shows this negative impact is amplified for students with higher intelligence.
We are just beginning to explore the reasons for this surprising finding. Perhaps greater sensitivity of the “gifted” group leads them to react with more anxiety to the violent media. And perhaps exposure to such media lowers their working memory capacity, reduces their attention to the mental task and thus lowers their performance. In our study, gifted children thought the violent cartoon was more violent, liked it less and saw it less frequently at home than did the other children.
Screen violence and harm
Our findings have implications for parents, educators and policymakers who need to be aware that violence on screen may have a negative impact on kids, and in particular gifted kids. The impact of violent video on verbal tasks could be particularly important given the heavily verbal nature of schools.
A just-released statement from The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended, along with attention to children’s “media diets,” that “parents should be mindful of what shows their children watch and which games they play.” Other experts too have warned that screen violence, whether real or fictional, could lead to nightmares, sleep disturbances and increased general anxiety.
Our findings support this earlier evidence. In general, the violence depicted in our videos was quite small compared to the violence that children are often exposed to, such as in the news. So, it’s possible our study provides a lower estimate on the impact of violent media on the mental performance of children.
Optimal educational development requires not only including positive impacts but also reducing and removing negative impacts. Such risk factors could be greatest for talented but disadvantaged students who likely live in neighborhoods with higher rates of violence, which might accumulate and contribute to their eventual underachievement.
With the rise of digital devices and constant switching of tasks, it is difficult to control student exposure to violence. However, more attention needs to be paid to media diets that could detract from educational development over a period of time.
Do students learn as much when they read digitally as they do in print?
For both parents and teachers, knowing whether computer-based media are improving or compromising education is a question of concern. With the surge in popularity of e-books, online learning and open educational resources, investigators have been trying to determine whether students do as well when reading an assigned text on a digital screen as on paper.
The answer to the question, however, needs far more than a yes-no response.
Reading in print versus digitally
In my research, I have compared the ways in which we read in print and onscreen. Between 2013 and 2015, I gathered data from 429 university students drawn from five countries (the U.S., Japan, Germany, Slovenia and India).
The students in my study reported that print was aesthetically more enjoyable, saying things such as “I like the smell of paper” or that reading in print is “real reading.” What’s more, print gave them a sense of where they were in the book – they could “see” and “feel” where they were in the text.
Print was also judged to be easier on the eyes and less likely to encourage multitasking. Almost half the participants complained about eyestrain from reading digitally (“my eyes burn”), and 67 percent indicated they were likely to multitask while reading digitally (compared with 41 percent when reading print).
At the same time, respondents praised digital reading on a number of counts, including the ability to read in the dark, ease of finding material (“plenty of quick information”), saving paper and even the fact they could multitask while reading.
Measuring learning
But the bigger question is whether students are learning as much when they read onscreen.
A number of researchers have sought to measure learning by asking people to read a passage of text, either in print or on a digital device, and then testing for comprehension.
Most studies have found that participants scored about the same when reading in each medium, though a few have indicated that students performed better on tests when they read in print.
The problem, however, with learning-measurement studies is that their notion of “learning” has tended to be simplistic. Reading passages and answering questions afterwards may be a familiar tool in standardized testing, but tells us little about any deeper level of understanding.
Some researchers are beginning to pose more nuanced questions, including one scholar who has considered what happens when people read a story in print or on a digital device and are then asked to reconstruct the plot sequence. The answer: Print yielded better results.
Another aspect of learning is to see how outcomes differ when students are doing their reading in less prescriptive experimental conditions. One study let students choose how much time to spend when reading on each platform. The researchers found that participants devoted less time to reading the passage onscreen – and performed less well on the subsequent comprehension test.
This finding is hardly surprising, given the tendency so many of us have to skim and search when going online, rather than reading slowly and carefully. In my study, one student commented,
“It takes more time to read the same number of pages in print comparing to digital.”
Another complained,
“It takes me longer because I read more carefully.”
Critical thinking and reading
How does the learning question relate to educational goals? There is much buzz today about wanting students to be good at critical thinking. Definitions of that goal are elusive, but it’s pretty clear they involve being able to understand complex ideas, evaluate evidence, weigh alternative perspectives and construct justifiable arguments.
To become proficient in critical thinking – at least in a literate society – students need to be able to handle text. The text may be long, complex or both. To make sense of it, students cannot skim, rush ahead or continually get distracted.
So, does reading in print versus onscreen build critical thinking skills?
Reading helps develop critical thinking skills. mrskradz, CC BY-ND
The comprehension studies we talked about earlier tell us little about the kind of reading we recognize as necessary for serious contemplation or analysis. An alternative approach, at least for starters, is asking students about their digital and paper-based reading patterns – much as physicians ask for histories (along with physicals and lab tests) to figure out what ails their patients.
While my own study didn’t directly measure learning, it did query students about their reading patterns and preferences. The responses to some of my questions were particularly revealing.
When asked on which medium they felt they concentrated best, 92 percent replied “print.” For long academic readings, 86 percent favored print. Participants also reported being more likely to reread academic materials if they were in print.
What’s more, a number of students indicated they believed print was a better medium for learning. One said,
“It’s easier to focus.”
Others stated,
“[I] feel like the content sticks in the head more easily” and
“I feel like I understand it more.”
By contrast, in talking about digital screens, students noted “danger of distraction” and “no concentration.”
Obviously, student perceptions are not the same thing as measurable learning outcomes. And my research didn’t probe connections between reading platforms and critical thinking.
However, a pattern did emerge: Print stood out as the medium for doing serious work.
Digital is convenient and cheaper
At the same time, we cannot ignore other factors impacting students’ decisions about what reading platform to chose for school work.
Convenience is one big consideration: More than 40 percent of participants in my study mentioned convenience (including easy access to materials) as what they liked most about reading onscreen.
Money is another variable. Students were highly conscious about differential prices for print and digital versions of reading materials, with cost often driving choice. As one student put it,
“Cost rules everything around me.”
Many students revealed a mismatch between finances and learning. When queried about which reading platform they would choose if cost were the same, 87 percent said “print” for academic work.
Adapting to digital learning
We also need to keep in mind the growing trend for universities to adapt their curricula to fit the proverbial “procrustean” bed of a digital world – a world tailor-made for skimming, scanning and using the “find” function rather than reading slowly and thoughtfully.
Professors now toy with ditching long or complex reading assignments in favor of short (or more straightforward) ones, moving closer to digital reading patterns in the nonacademic world. This world hypes condensed versions of texts and shorter reading material that is bite-sized to begin with.
The question then is how can universities help students read text thoughtfully, reflectively, and without distraction on digital devices?
One key could be adaptation. Research suggests students may be overconfident about what they are understanding when they read digitally. Teaching them to be mindful in their digital reading (for instance, by writing down key words from the reading) may help in learning.
Another form of adaptation is happening in the realm of digital hardware and software. Modern screens cause less eyestrain, and annotation programs continue to improve. Some digital reading devices now come with tools enabling them to digitally approximate physical page flipping and multiple place-marking.
However, in my view, while short-and-to-the-point may be a good fit for digital consumption, it’s not the sort of reading likely to nurture the critical thinking we still talk about as a hallmark of university education.
Note: Julie Bradley has been an educator for more than 30 years. Her expertise has taken her to outback Australia and around the world presenting to educators and parents on spelling and foundational skills. Mrs Bradley is Managing Director of Smart Achievers, a worldwide distributor for Smart Words Spelling, Reading and Perceptual Motor Programs.
Another amazing session in Minnesota, USA with spelling guru, Denise Eide, was on Greek and Latin roots. You might wonder why we need to bother with these when we are learning how to spell words in English. What’s interesting is that 95% of multisyllabic words in English are based on Latin and Greek roots.
Here are some key points from the lessons:
Knowing the history of words and sounds helps us to understand how to spell them. If we know which, when and how to use suffixes and prefixes we can extend our working vocabulary by thousands of words in one lesson, in one day.
We have to start getting smarter in the way we are teaching our kids. This is very important if we want our kids to be considered literate and to know 200,000 words by the time they are 26 years old.
A list of 20 words a week is not going to help kids make the grade. In fact, they won’t even rate as ‘average’ if they learn 100 words a week. They have to learn 27 words a day, 365 days a year, for 20 years to rate as ‘well educated.’
With some clever teaching, kids can learn how to spell thousands of words. We can help them do this with simple explanations and a few well planned activities.
When kids know how to spell words, they know the code needed to read and write. Reading won’t teach kids to spell, though. If they don’t know the code well, they won’t trust it enough to use it. That’s why we have so many struggling readers today.
No kid should be left behind. You may think ‘so what if they can’t spell?’ Did you know that 85% of juvenile offenders are functionally illiterate? Literacy rates are closely tied to delinquency and are considered by some to be the best predictor that a kid may end up in prison or on welfare. Today, 70% of inmates are functionally illiterate!
So my question is: what do you want for your kids?
In four days in the Minnesota, USA I have learnt amazing ways to make it easier for our kids to learn how to spell words so they can achieve success in both reading and writing.
I can’t wait to get home and start sharing it all with you.
Join my quest to help kids so we don’t hear any more sad stories of kids feeling “dumb” and ashamed because they can’t read and write.
Let’s change our children’s lives for the better, today.
More rigorous math and science requirements for high school graduation are in place, and simultaneously dropout rates in the country are up.
Research back to 1990 showed that the US dropout rate rose to a high of 11.4 percent when students were required to take six math and science courses, compared with 8.6 percent for students who needed less math and science courses in order to graduate.
The dropout rate is up to 5 percentage points higher when gender, race and ethnicity are considered.
William F. Tate, vice provost for graduate education and dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences says that part of the problem with adding math and science courses to requirements was that a significant number of students weren’t prepared to meet the revised requirements.
Andrew Plunk, a postdoctoral research fellow in the psychiatry department at Washington University School of Medicine, says the study highlights that the one-size-fits all approach to education requirements is not ideal due to various demographic groups, states and school districts that are all different.
When educational policies cause an unintentional consequence like an increase in students dropping out, the effects reverberate far beyond the classroom walls.
“Communities with higher dropout rates tend to have increased crime,” says Plunk. “Murders are more common. A previous study estimated that a 1 percent reduction in the country’s high school dropout rate could result in 400 fewer murders per year.”
While I do feel that the high drop out rate could be blamed on math and science courses, I don’t feel that the US should ease up on those requirements. I think the key is to better prepare the students. We need to make sure the students are ready for the requirements and aim to help all students graduate high school.
Child hunger is a serious problem: 48 million Americans, including more than 15 million children, live in households that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis. In large cities, about 25 percent of households with children do not have sufficient food.
The federally funded National School Breakfast Program has long sought to improve these numbers, by providing a free or low-cost breakfast for students in participating schools. In addition to reducing food insecurity, the program has been found to improve students’ health and nutritional intake as well as their academic achievement.
Even though school breakfast is affordable (or free), meets federal nutrition guidelines and has the potential to benefit children in multiple ways, participation in the School Breakfast Program is surprisingly low. Nationally, only about half of eligible students participating in the School Lunch Program take breakfast.
In fact, in New York City, less than a third of all students take a breakfast each day. This is particularly surprising because breakfast has been offered free to all students since September 2003.
So why are the numbers taking advantage of free breakfast so low? What difference might it make if they were higher?
Why don’t kids eat free breakfast?
There are several reasons that participation in the School Breakfast Program is low.
First, breakfast is offered in the cafeteria before school hours, and many students are unable to arrive to school early, because of transportation or family commitments. Second, children may not be aware that breakfast is served in the cafeteria before school. Finally, children are often unwilling because of the stigma associated with a trip to the cafeteria for a free breakfast.
Introduced more than a decade ago, Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC) has been adopted in many school districts as part of the school day. Breakfast is offered free to all students in their classroom at the start of the day, rather than providing it in the cafeteria before the bell. Cities such as Los Angeles, Dallas, Detroit, Cincinnati and Newark show high rates of participation.
Here is how it works
Breakfast in the Classroom is given during the first 10-20 minutes of the school day. It typically includes cold, packaged items (such as cereal, bagels, yogurt and fresh fruit). In some schools, breakfast is offered on mobile carts as students walk in the door (“Grab-n-Go”), or as a “Second Chance” breakfast, between the first and second periods of middle or high school.
New York City began rolling out Breakfast in the Classroom in 2007. According to the Department of Education, the program is now offered in nearly 500 of the city’s 1,700 schools. The city serves over 30,000 classroom breakfasts each day. Beginning this year, it is expanding the program to all elementary schools. And there are plans to extend the program to all schools in the district.
Advocates for the program argue that in addition to reducing hunger and food insecurity, moving breakfast from the cafeteria into the classroom will, in turn, improve school attendance and academic performance. Some also argue it will improve student engagement by building a sense of community around eating breakfast together, and provide an opportunity to integrate nutrition and healthy eating habits into the curriculum.
However, critics have raised concerns that Breakfast in the Classroom could contribute to weight gain, as some children consume more calories by eating two breakfasts – one at home and one at school. Or that the program could take away from instructional time at the start of the school day.
What does evidence show?
Our research looked at the early effects of New York City’s Breakfast in the Classroom program. We examined the program’s effects on school breakfast participation, student weight outcomes including body mass index (BMI) and obesity, as well as academic outcomes. We tracked data on student weight and academic achievement at different points of time, to compare students in schools that did and did not adopt the program.
Our sample included students in over 1,100 NYC public elementary and middle schools between the 2006-07 and 2011-12 school years (of which about 300 offered Breakfast in the Classroom at the time of our study).
To begin with, we found that serving breakfast in classroom substantially increased school breakfast participation. For example, in schools offering breakfast in classroom in 25 percent or more of classrooms but not schoolwide, the participation rate nearly doubled. The increase was even higher – about two-and-a-half times – for schools offering the program schoolwide.
Importantly, we found no evidence that Breakfast in the Classroom led to student weight gain. We found no impact on BMI or the incidence of obesity. We also found no evidence that breakfast in the classroom reduced academic performance, as measured by achievement on reading and math standardized tests for students in grades three through eight.
Serve breakfast in classrooms
Our study suggests that the program certainly did no harm by taking away from instructional time or increasing student weight.
Taken together, our results show serving breakfast in the classroom increased participation in school breakfast even when free breakfast was being served in the school cafeteria.
Our work also shows critics’ fears that the Breakfast in the Classroom program will cause weight gain and reduce academic performance due to a loss of instructional time are largely unwarranted. There is no reason, therefore, not to expand Breakfast in the Classroom.
The SAT, the test that many schools require to check for college readiness, has recently gone through a makeover. Perhaps the most significant change is to the writing portion of the SAT, which presents students with new and more complex reading and and writing challenges.
College Board, the nonprofit that administers the test, had earlier announced that the essay in the writing section would be optional. However, many schools in the U.S. require their students to take the writing exam.
Connecticut, New Hampshire and Michigan are examples of such states, where the SAT, including its writing exam, is required, not optional. What’s more, scores from these tests are critical beyond their acceptance and placement in some colleges.
The SAT serves as the measure of the educational progress for all students in each state that adopts the SAT for that purpose. In such cases, the SAT is more than a bridge between high school and college. SAT has become a “high-stakes” K-12 assessment. In fact, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
But are schools preparing students adequately to take the new SAT?
I have been working for a number of years with K-12 writing teachers in Michigan on designing more effective approaches to learning in writing as part of my research. I believe the new writing test is complex and requires skills that U.S. schools are not teaching students.
The new SAT
First, let’s take a look at what’s different about the new writing assessment.
In a break from most standardized writing assessments, the new essay task is not designed to elicit students’ subjective opinions. Rather, its aim is to assess whether students are able to comprehend an appropriately challenging source text and craft an effective written analysis of that text.
For years, the formula for success on high-stakes writing assessments has been to craft a five-paragraph structure: thesis paragraph, three supporting paragraphs and a concluding paragraph. Within that structure, students are more or less free to say anything, and the more creative and engaging that “anything” is, the better.
Les Perelman, the former director of MIT’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, who helped create MIT’s writing placement test, summed it up, when he said:
It doesn’t matter if [what you write] is true or not…In fact, trying to be true will hold you back.
As Perelman noted, “in relaying personal experiences, students who took time attempting to recall an appropriately relatable circumstance from their lives were at a disadvantage.”
The revised SAT, therefore, is a major shift from “subjective opinion” to an analysis based on a real-world nonfiction persuasive passage.
The table below provides a quick overview of what the revised SAT asks of students. The five paragraph structure is still there, but the intellectual work required of students is vastly different.
Students read a nonfiction argument that may be in the form of speeches, opinion editorials or articles that tend not to have simple for or against arguments but convey more nuanced views. Students are expected to marshal evidence about how the author builds a persuasive argument.
What makes the test challenging?
The first significant challenge is that the new prompt asks students to read rhetorically. Rhetorical reading is a form of analysis that is different from more literary forms of analysis that are likely taught in schools.
For example, the new SAT prompt asks students to notice how an author achieves a purpose, shapes a text for an audience and organizes information to achieve a goal. Students need to be able to analyze an argument pulled from topics across the disciplines.
For students to be able to do this, teachers need to help students become better rhetorical readers and better writers. This new way of reading and teaching reading must be layered into already overloaded existing curricula.
The second significant challenge, of course, is the writing itself.
In the past, success on “high-stakes” writing tests like the SAT could be achieved by following a highly structured formula.
That will no longer work. Instead, students will be asked to make arguments based on their own analytical reasoning. They will be required to marshal real evidence – not made-up events – drawn from the passage to be analyzed.
And students will be required to do this quickly, within a time frame in which they will already be engaged in more complex reading practices.
Writing instruction in schools
The reading and writing required by the new SAT will be new for students and many teachers. Rhetorical reading requires “reading like a writer” and answering questions such as “Why did the author do it this way?” Students will then have to write up that analysis in a way that makes evidence-based arguments.
Any examination of English Language Arts curriculum in U.S. middle and high schools will reveal a nearly complete focus on literary forms and genres with relatively little writing. The basic values and focus that give us our “English” curriculum date back to a 19th-century shiftfrom classical modes of education toward the study of literary texts. It was a shift from Latin and Greek models of discourse, and, most importantly, instruction in speaking and writing, to a shift to literature in English and a focus on reading and analysis.
The curriculum that resulted from these broad changes over time is “English,” and direct instruction in writing has never recovered. The National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges, a project to help improve the teaching of writing, argues that writing is the “neglected R” in education. That same report notes that little time is spent on writing instruction – at best less than three hours a week. In a recent survey, 82 percent of teens report that their typical school writing assignment is a paragraph to one page in length.
[T]he actual writing that goes on in typical classrooms across the United States remains dominated by tasks in which the teacher does all the composing, and students are left only to fill in missing information, whether copying directly from a teacher’s presentation, completing worksheets and chapter summaries, replicating highly formulaic essay structures keyed to high-stakes tests, or writing to “show they know” the particular information the teacher is seeking.
Let’s not teach to the test
I work with teachers and schools quite anxious about how to respond.
Anxious parents – mostly parents of students who struggle with language or have learning disabilities – have asked me questions about the revised SAT.
Teacher preparation programs have historically provided little to no preparation in teaching writing to new teachers, though this is slowly changing. Surely, good teachers and attentive schools will develop well-designed approaches to the new SAT. But I believe responding to the exam is the wrong approach and misses the point.
What is required is a comprehensive change in how we value writing and writing instruction. If that were to happen, then more complex writing exams would be taken in stride because our approaches to learning in writing would exceed the demands of any high-stakes test.
Demand for innovation is at an all-time high. Innovation is now recognized as being key to economic growth strategies in the United States, Canada and countries in the European Union.
As a result, there is an increased need to understand what drives innovation. Certainly traditional research and development, funded by both the private and public sectors, continues to remain a primary source of new ideas and products. But innovation demands innovators.
So where do innovators come from? And how do they acquire their skills?
One place – perhaps among the best – is college. Over the past seven years, my research has explored the influence of college on preparing students with the capacity, desire and intention to innovate.
In this time we’ve learned that many academic and social experiences matter quite a bit; grades, however, do not matter as much.
What influences student innovation?
Our ongoing research, an example of which can be found here, has surveyed over 10,000 full-time undergraduate and graduate students in four countries – the United States, Canada, Germany and Qatar.
Our sample includes a wide diversity of students: those in fields of study often associated with innovation and entrepreneurship (e.g., business, engineering) as well as more traditional majors (e.g., arts, humanities, education); those from differing races/ethnicities and gender identifications; those from different socioeconomic and political backgrounds; and those from families that already include, or do not include, entrepreneurs.
To learn more, we asked students about their innovation intentions and capacities, their higher education experiences, and their background characteristics. We also administered a “personality inventory” to address the question of whether innovators are born or made.
We conducted a series of statistical analyses that allowed us to isolate the influence of any one individual attribute (e.g., classroom experiences, GPA, personality, gender, etc.) on our innovation outcomes.
Here is what our analyses have revealed so far:
Classroom practices make a difference: students who indicated that their college assessments encouraged problem-solving and argument development were more likely to want to innovate. Such an assessment frequently involves evaluating students in their abilities to create and answer their own questions; to develop case studies based on readings as opposed to responding to hypothetical cases; and/or to make and defend arguments. Creating a classroom conducive to innovation was particularly important for undergraduate students when compared to graduate students.
Faculty matters – a lot: students who formed a close relationship with a faculty member or had meaningful interactions (i.e., experiences that had a positive influence on one’s personal growth, attitudes and values) with faculty outside of class demonstrated a higher likelihood to be innovative. When a faculty member is able to serve as a mentor and sounding board for student ideas, exciting innovations may follow.
Interestingly, we saw the influence of faculty on innovation outcomes in our analyses even after accounting for a student’s field of study, suggesting that promoting innovation can happen across disciplines and curricula. Additionally, when we ran our statistical models using a sample of students from outside the United States, we found that faculty relationships were still very important. So, getting to know a faculty member might be a key factor for promoting innovation among college students, regardless of where the education takes place or how it is delivered.
Peer networking is effective: outside the classroom, students who connected course learning with social issues and career plans were also more innovative. For example, students who initiated informal discussions about how to combine the ideas they were learning in their classes to solve common problems and address global concerns were the ones who most likely recognized opportunities for creating new businesses or nonprofit social ventures.
Being innovative was consistently associated with the college providing students with space and opportunities for networking, even after considering personality type, such as being extroverted.
Networking remained salient when we analyzed a sample of graduate students – in this instance, those pursuing M.B.A. degrees in the United States. We take these findings as a positive indication that students are spending their “out-of-class” time learning to recognize opportunities and discussing new ideas with peers.
Who are the innovators?
On the basis of our findings, we believe that colleges might be uniquely positioned to cultivate a new generation of diverse innovators.
Counter to the Thiel Fellowship, an initiative that pays individuals to step out of college in order to become entrepreneurs, our work supports efforts by colleges and universities to combine classroom learning with entrepreneurial opportunities and to integrate education with innovation.
One of our most interesting findings was that as GPAs went down, innovation tended to go up. Even after considering a student’s major, personality traits and features of the learning environment, students with lower GPAs reported innovation intentions that were, on average, greater than their higher-GPA counterparts.
In short: GPA was associated with innovation, but maybe not in the direction you’d think.
From our findings, we speculate that this relationship may have to do with what innovators prioritize in their college environment: taking on new challenges, developing strategies in response to new opportunities and brainstorming new ideas with classmates.
Time spent in these areas might really benefit innovation, but not necessarily GPA.
Additionally, findings elsewhere strongly suggest that innovators tend to be intrinsically motivated – that is, they are interested in engaging pursuits that are personally meaningful, but might not be immediately rewarded by others.
We see this work as confirmation of our findings – grades, by their very nature, tend to reflect the abilities of individuals motivated by receiving external validation for the quality of their efforts.
Perhaps, for these reasons, the head of people operations at Google has noted:
GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring.
Somewhat troubling, though in line with concerns that plague the entrepreneurship community, women were less likely to demonstrate innovation intentions than men, all else being equal.
This is a problem, especially given jarring statistics that venture capitalists are funding males – specifically white males – more than any other group.
Such findings also speak to the need for higher education to intervene and actively introduce the broadest range of individuals to educational experiences and environments that spur the generation and implementation of new ideas. Fresh and creative ideas, after all, are not restricted to any one gender, race or family background.
As we say in our forthcoming paper’s finding on gender:
Imagine the explosion of new processes and products that would emerge in a world where half the population was socialized to believe that it could and should innovate.
