When I first saw the headline, I thought it was too ironic to be true: Texas school teaching abstinence-only sex ed suffers chlamydia outbreak.
I would’ve probably even laughed if I hadn’t realized quickly that it was not only true, but that it meant dozens of kids now had to deal with the discomfort and potential long-term harm of a sexually transmitted disease. These are kids that were clearly not practicing abstinence and were ill-prepared for real-life sexual encounters. It isn’t the fault of these kids, either.
It is irresponsible of school systems to teach abstinence-only sexual education and it should be illegal in public schools.
Should abstinence be taught as the only sure way to avoid things like unplanned pregnancies and STDs? Of course it should because it IS the only absolute way. But that abstinence extends beyond basic sexual intercourse. Students need to understand exactly all the ways they can be harmed by unprotected sex and then given the power to protect themselves.
The argument that parents should be the only ones to talk to their kids about sexual options just doesn’t cut it because it is elitist. It only works for students whose parents have the time or concern to actually sit down with their kids and have that talk. It leaves out the many students whose parents won’t actually have this talk with their kids or the ones who will preach abstinence-only. Schools have the responsibility to educate to their best of their abilities, and let’s face it: abstinence-only sex ed fails that mantra miserably.
What do you think? Should public schools be required to teach safe sex practices?
Are you interested in reforming a school or a district? Let’s go back to basics.
The first step to positive K-12 reform within a school or a district is to find a starting point. Often, data sets are used to determine this. This is great, but what if I told you there was another way? One that could capture the whole picture just a little bit better than data alone?
Here’s how successful school districts can improve with both data and common sense observations:
1. Develop an evaluation plan. This is to measure how effective a reform effort is.
Create performance goals. These goals will come in handy once it’s time to see how well your school or district is doing with the new changes.
2. Evaluate the pros and cons of instructional programs. School reformers need to do this regularly. You also need to realize that standardized tests should only make up a piece of the assessment puzzle, not the entirety. Continuously monitoring the progress the school’s student body makes will allow your task force to make changes to the reform plan when it’s necessary.
3. Put in some checks and balances. Make sure a variety of reformers are making the important decisions.
For instance, superintendents are responsible for making sure that creating and sustaining improvements is done in a way that meets students’ needs. The team leader’s job is to ensure teachers have all of the tools needed to help their students excel in class.
4. Keep everyone accountable. This is something that districts all over the country acknowledge as the key to improving schools. Everyone is expected to perform. To make sure this happens, the school district needs to provide staff and faculty members with high-quality professional development.
5. Keep an eye on your restructuring efforts. Your team should have useful data meant to track progress toward the goals set in step 1. Now it’s time to decide who will collect, analyze, and interpret that data. The best way to avoid bias is to hire an outside consultant—your team will receive more objective feedback about your reform efforts.
On a limited budget? Don’t worry—evaluating the results in-house is still a highly desirable option.
After analyzing the data, your team can then use the results to determine how effective the reform was.
What happens if the reform fails? Don’t worry. School restructuring is a long-term process. Simply build upon the small successes and learn from mistakes. Your team can then come up with new solutions, or fix the old solution to better suit the school’s needs.
If you want permanent improvement, reform has to occur continuously. Even the best schools need to continue to work on their restructuring process.
Is a long-lasting school reform that changes the lifeblood of the school possible? Yes, of course. It may not be easy, but with a tremendous effort, the proper use of resources, and the expertise of professionals, school reform can be wildly successful.
You may have noticed that I do not focus on data in this article. Does that mean it’s not important? No, of course it doesn’t! However, there is a lot more that goes into the bigger picture of smart school reform. Districts should recognize that and work towards solutions that not only make sense on paper, but also in real life.
Is data important? What role do you think it plays in school reform efforts? Don’t forget to leave a comment.
“You’re in engineering!?! Wow, you must be super-smart…”
It has been over 10 years since I was a first-year engineering undergraduate student; but when I remember the time a fellow female student made this comment, I can still feel a visceral, bodily reaction: my muscles tense, my heart rate increases, my breath quickens.
Comments like these on the surface appear as compliments. But when unpacked, they reveal subversive attitudes about women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).
As I think back to this encounter, there are two aspects that stay with me. First was the surprised, skeptical tone of the other student’s voice that conveyed it was surprising and unusual (or, to put it more crudely, freakish) that I was in engineering. Second was the attitude that since I was in engineering, this could be explained only if there was something exceptional or outstanding (or, once again, freakish) about me. Women remain an underrepresented group in STEM. In Canada, women account for 23% of engineering graduates and 30% of mathematics and computer graduates. In the United States, women are 12% of the engineering and 26% of the computing workforce.
The reality is that STEM professions are most commonly male and it remains surprising when these professional roles are held by women. The large gender imbalance means that women may naturally feel they’re outsiders at school and at work. This situation is often uncomfortable and mentally demanding, when even just showing up and doing your job comes with constant social stresses and anxiety. Ironically, the difficulties that they (we) encounter often dissuade the next generation of women from joining us. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle that we need to break.
Fight or flight, designed for quick response
Because of their underrepresentation, women in STEM often regularly question their place in these professions. When things feel uncomfortable – like when I was confronted with that comment a decade ago – our brains can overinterpret the situation as an imminent threat. And there’s an evolutionary reason for that physical response.
This stress response evolved in human beings to help us navigate a wild, dangerous and unpredictable world. When faced with imminent danger, like a pouncing tiger, our bodies have evolved an automatic reaction to help us react fast. Stress hormones are released, the heart beats harder and faster, breathing becomes rapid and muscles tense, ready for action.
This automatic response prepares our bodies for possible actions: fight or flight! From the perspective of evolutionary adaptation, it’s in our best interests NOT to distinguish between life-threatening and non-life-threatening dangers. Act first, think later. In the African wilds in which early humans roamed, the consequence of underreacting could mean death.
Good during lion attack, less good during daily life
In modern life, we don’t have to worry much about attacks from lions, tigers or bears. But adaptive mechanisms are still very much a part of our brain’s biology.
The flight-or-flight response is intended to be short-term. The problem comes in when stress becomes a daily part of life, triggering a physiological response that’s actually detrimental to health over the long term. Repeated and long-term releases of the stress hormone cortisol cause changes in brain structure that leave individuals more susceptible to anxiety and mood disorders, including depression. When exposed to long-term stress, the brain structure called the hippocampus shrinks, affecting one’s short-term memory and ability to learn.
These physical stress responses can unfortunately run at a constant low level of activation in people who are made to feel like they don’t belong or aren’t good enough – such as women in STEM. Social situations like my undergraduate encounter – and their ramifications – are a part of day-to-day life.
Sadly, the percentages of women working in these fields have remained stagnant for decades. In 1987, women represented 20% of the STEM workforce in Canada. In 2015, their numbers remain unchanged at 22%. In the United States, the reality is very similar, with women representing 24% of the workforce. Confrontational reactions like “You’re in engineering!?!” communicate the message that as a woman, one may not belong in the social group of engineering. The brain perceives these kinds of social interactions as threatening, dangerous and stressful.
The social cues that women may not belong in male-dominated STEM fields can often be subtle. For example, researchers have shown that the presence in labs of objects considered stereotypical of computer science, such as Star Trek and video game posters, are perceived as stereotypically masculine and can dissuade women from expressing interest in topics like computer programming.
Moreover, seemingly complimentary “Wow, you must be super-smart!” comments also communicate an even more troubling possibility that, in order to belong in this group (of men), as a woman, one must be exceptional. Women + Engineering = Super Smart.
But what if a female student is not exceptionally intelligent? What if she is only ordinarily smart? Or, even more troubling, what if she does not believe that she is smart at all? In her mind, she becomes a sheep in wolf’s clothing, an impostor who has tricked those around her into accepting her into a group where she does not belong. From the brain’s perspective, this is literally interpreted as being in the lion’s den.
Women can flourish in STEM, but it can mean shutting out the noise. USAID Asia, CC BY-NC
STEM should welcome everyone
So what can be done? If we are to increase the participation of women in STEM fields, we must make workplace and educational environments inclusive. In order to thrive, female students need to believe that they belong in technical professions, in both academia and the private sector.
The social marginalization caused by gender imbalances in STEM programs can be mitigated. Targeted intervention programs that foster social belonging and coping mechanisms to deal with stress and threat can help women develop skills to handle the mental challenges caused by gender inequality and help women integrate into their male-dominated environment.
Connecting female students with female professional role models such as mentors or instructors has also been extremely effective at improving women’s self-concept and commitment to STEM.
Finally, campaigns like the #Ilooklikeanengineer hashtag disrupt our common stereotyping of STEM professionals and help support a cultural shift.
The rates of female representation in STEM will not change overnight. It will probably be at least another generation before parity becomes an achievable target. But it’s through changing these attitudes and stereotypes that we will reduce some of the social stresses on women in these fields, helping women choose STEM as a career path, stay in these fields, and most importantly, remain healthy and happy.
**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 post by Megel Barker
I overheard a conversation a few days ago between two of my colleagues. The text of the interchange was the concern with the frequency of emails and more importantly there was some doubt about the relevance of most of them. The conclusion centered round the idea that emails were a major distraction to the serious issue of teaching. One colleague signed off with a retort that maybe we were all better before emails.
This final utterance really made me think. I pondered what the world of teaching was like before emails became the daily deliverer of information. How did we get by? A cursory check with other teachers conveyed a similar annoyance with the uninvited intrusion of email on their daily duties. Another task added to the ever burgeoning list of ‘to-dos”.
Twilight Zone
But how could we arrive at this place? How is it that in the age of information, teachers are feeling overwhelmed, confused, tensed and lost when confronted with an inbox of school e-mails? Rather strangely, we seemed to have entered a twilight world of either under-information or over-information. The former, occurs when important emails become swamped or lost in your inbox, while the latter manifesting as being told everything happening in school. So where did we go wrong? Do we all need to know that someone’s goldfish died? Do we all need to know that a new student has joined the school, when I won’t teach him this year?
A quick survey among my colleagues, gleaned a similar sentiment. Emails are the bane of teacher communication in fact it is even being touted as having significant contribution to teacher morale. How could such a technological improvement, one that enhances the sharing of information and is proven to improve time become the sore thumb in a school environment? I have even heard the words “detest” and “hate’ being associated with some teachers’ feelings toward this mode of communication.
Staff Morale
Knowing that email must be a good thing, I decided to look at email from a purely mathematical perspective and see if it was possible to determine an optimal solution to this dilemma. The common thread that I identified from my simple survey was that email had two variables affecting the environment in which it operates. These variables were Email Volume (EV) and Email Relevance (ER). Email Volume was literally the number of emails received daily, while relevance referred to the impact the email had on the teacher carrying out their daily functions effectively.
The graphic shows four possible situations that teachers can encounter in their work environment. Each scenario has, I believe, a tremendous impact on teacher morale.
Situation A
Situation A is the case where there is a high volume of emails in the school environment. Everyone emails and everything is emailed. All important documents are shared by emailed and all official communications are disseminated by this medium. Staff is expected to read emails but is also expected to read and respond in this way. The reality of this is that the emails are all important! They have high relevance to staff’s daily work but the volume is quite high. This type of environment is quite pressured, where staff feels compelled to read emails but is strapped for time. The morale in that environment is
Situation B
A full inbox is the daily expectation. In this scenario, everything is shared and important emails get lost in the traffic. Teachers are constantly informed about every event in school with numerous follow-ups and communiques that involve issues that require no action. Social events and social notes are posted without concern for who might want to know. The bulk group “all teachers” is used with impunity. This creates an environment that makes teachers disconnect from the emails. They adopt a system that involves requiring them to be reminded that an email was sent. This disconnection can lead to a level of apathy among teachers and paradoxically also a level of tension. This tension, coming from the sensation, that they might be missing something that has great importance.
Situation C
An almost empty email inbox is the daily fare. Numbers of messages in your inbox is small and is irrelevant. This is not a common scenario for most teachers however it is an all too familiar experience for new teachers. This situation plagues the newcomer mostly and can be traced to not being added to main mailing lists. The natural outcome of this is that the teacher is less informed about important and relevant issues and is constantly left to find things out at the coffee bar or in the staff room. Teachers can either disengage from the system or they can complain that they do not know what is going on. Morale is indeed low here; a feeling of detachment persists and can affect performance especially if high relevance information is not shared.
Situation D
The only emails received have high relevance to the teacher’s practice. There is a very low volume of email but each email is entirely impacting on daily practice. Even though the volume is low, the information shared is current, composed and clear. In this scenario, it would be expected to have other means of sharing information such as Google Drives or folders kept on a local server with vital forms and archived information. Essentially, there is an expectation that the only people who get the emails are the ones who will be able to do something about it. Morale here is high and teachers feel valued, they feel their time is being recognized as truly important and so they respond by being energized and motivated. Work gets done and communication is valued.
The table above shows my summary of the four potential dimensions of email in the workplace and the prevailing morale. Despite the clear cry from all I interviewed for situation D, none of my respondents felt they had experienced this Utopian world. In fact they feel it is impossible to have this outcome at their current workplace. This is worrying. Emails should make us more efficient. I propose that Situation D is the optimal solution and I believe that schools should strive for this to materialize. So how do they do this?
An email protocol?
While there will be positives and negatives regarding this, schools should engage with their staff and collaborate on an email protocol. Some key features of this would include:
Clarity on who is copied on emails
Who uses the bulk email features such as “allstaff@….com
The frequency with which emails are shared from admin
Other means of sharing information such as cloud drives
Use of “reply all”
The frequency of social emails
How the subject line of the email is worded
So, which of these scenarios best describe your current email climate? Is my description of staff morale correct? Please respond to my survey by clicking on the link: http://goo.gl/forms/I7y6P9hPXh.
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Megel Barker is a Google Certified Educator that has taught mathematics for 21 years. He’s currently Assistant Principal at an International School in Oman and has written two workbooks that support the Oman GED Exams. You can follow him on Twitter @mathter.
It’s one of those debates that has seemingly gone on forever. All the way back to the ancient Greeks, people have been trying to figure out the best way to choose teachers.
Australian governments, most notably the NSW government and their commonwealth counterparts, have made “lifting the bar” to entry into the teaching profession a priority. Most recently, education minister Christopher Pyne announced plans to have aspiring teachers sit exams before getting into the classroom. While other states are trying to set university entrance score cutoffs for teaching.
These governments are seeking to tackle the perception (and, in some cases, reality) that there is a decline in the standard of entry into the teaching profession. Indeed, it is true that the average Australian Tertiary Admission Ranks (ATAR) for undergraduate teacher education have been slipping year on year, with some universities accepting applicants into teaching with ATARs below 50.
But ATAR cutoffs aren’t the best measure for the quality of pre-service teachers, and they would only likely affect the 40% of people who use ATARs to get into teaching in the first place.
But with quality teaching having such a big impact on student achievement, we should be looking at ways to better select teachers before they enter the classroom. If not, just to address the problem of so many new teachers dropping out.
A web-based tool, TeacherSelector is comprised of a battery of tests and is now used by a number of education institutions in Australia and overseas to help with their selection processes. We are also using it, along with a student’s academic record, to better select students into the Master of Teachingfrom next year.
TeacherSelector sees students complete a series of questionaires online, over a period of about one to one and a half hours. These questionnaires are based on what qualities we know excellent teachers have; factors like achievement, experience, motivation and personal attributes. The aim is to select people into teacher education programs who will suit the teaching profession.
After all, there’s more to being a great teacher than getting high academic scores. They also need relationship skills, communication skills and sensitivity to others. We know that previous academic achievement and experience as well as certain aspects of personality, can give us a pretty good picture of an individual’s future success in teacher education and their teaching career.
Using a Five Factor Model, we look at key personality traits, including emotional stability, conscientiousness, perseverance or grit, openness to views of others. We also ask open-ended questions about how individuals engage with others, apply themselves to tasks and manage emotion under stress when there are many competing demands on their time. This information can tell us a lot about an individual’s ability to self-regulate, their resilience, their communication style and other personal attributes.
There are also sections asking for transcripts of academic performance, but to complement this, TeacherSelector also measures general cognitive ability, including numerical, verbal and spatial reasoning. This is because general cognitive ability has been shown to be a good predictor of high performance as a beginner teacher.
Finally, the test also covers the individual’s motivation for, understanding of and experience with teaching, through a series of written responses; highly effective teachers are known to be passionate about teaching and learning, and show a deep understanding of their content area.
What we’re finding out
Our findings about TeacherSelector to date generally confirm what we already know, but we are also finding that candidates have a strong interest in using their individual results as as way to become a better teacher. They can identify their own strengths, as well as areas they would like to work on, and take proactive steps to address these, with the support of academic staff.
We are also interested in the predictive capacity of the tool and have embarked on longitudinal studies to establish which factors predict prolonged career engagement and service.
TeacherSelector is not dissimilar to other selection processes that have been used for many years in disciplines like business and medicine, as well as professional career selection. Given the high stakes involved in recruiting the right candidates into teaching, it’s wise to introduce similar measures in education, for the good of our teaching students and, ultimately, students in schools.
The Turning the Tide report released last week by the Harvard Graduate School of Education has colleges and universities across the country taking a hard look at what many believe is a deeply flawed admissions process.
The new report characterizes the message being sent by colleges to high schools “as simply valuing their achievements, not their responsibility for others and their communities.” It asks college admissions officers to take the following three primary steps to improve the admissions process so that it is fairer and inculcates a concern for others:
promote more meaningful contributions through community service and other engagement for the public good
assess how students engage and contribute to family as well as community across race, culture and class
redefine achievement in ways that level the playing field for economically diverse students and reduce excessive achievement pressure.
However, what often gets left out of admission criteria is a student’s creativity. As a creativity researcher, I have studied many aspects of creativity that reinforce the idea that creativity is a valuable and necessary attribute for students in the 21st century.
Why measure creativity?
Creativity can be seen at all levels – from young children to geniuses. Creativity can help us discover new things, from the next generation of smartphones to new ways of recycling our trash.
It enables us to make art, tell stories, design buildings, test hypotheses and try new recipes. Indeed, creative people have been found to be more likely to succeed in business and be happier in life.
There is a growing volume of research that shows putting greater emphasis on creativity assessments in the college application process could provide a more holistic impression of students’ potential. Right now, we look only at a narrow range of abilities, which means that we over-reward people with certain strengths and penalize people with other strengths.
Studies have shown that the most widely used standardized performance tests for college admission, the SAT, is a better predictor of college success for white students than African-American and Hispanic-American students.
However, creativity assessments are more likely to be gender- and ethnically neutral, thereby avoiding the potential for bias.
A study we conducted recently on more than 600 college applicants compared applicants’ performance on a series of online tests assessing various forms of creativity to application data, which included SAT scores, class rank and college admission interview scores.
We found that traditional admissions measures (SAT scores and GPA) were only weakly related to the creativity measures. Further, people with high creative self-efficacy (i.e., people who think they are creative) did slightly worse on some admission tests.
We are continuing to capture data about students over the course of their college careers to assess whether including creativity tests with traditional admissions measures can better predict student outcomes such as retention, college success and graduation rates.
Assessing creativity makes a difference
We do understand that assessing students’ creativity would not be easy. But that is not to say it is impossible.
As part of the admissions process, students could be asked about how they would solve world problems or what their dream job would be or how they would spend lottery winnings; these responses could then be rated for their creativity by admission officers or trained raters. Many studies have shown that this is a reliable and valid way of measuring creativity, although it can be resource-intensive.
Some universities may ask such questions in current admissions, but most do not actually score answers for creativity. In fact, being creative on admissions essays can actually hurt students.
If there are concerns about adding too much stress on students during applications, schools could use a portfolio approach in which students could simply upload a poem, drawing, movie, invention or science experiment that they have already produced.
The fact is that using creativity as a criterion in admissions has been done before. At one point, Cornell University Professor of Human Development Robert Sternberg and colleagues included creativity and practical intelligence as an optional part of college admissions at Tufts University. What Sternberg and colleagues found was that students enjoyed the application process more and the average SAT score of all applicants increased from previous years.
In an equally important outcome, differences on these new measures showed reduced or no ethnic differences, and minority admissions increased.
Such results are typical in creativity studies. Whereas many standardized or intelligence tests show ethnic, cultural or gender differences, creativity measures tend to produce no differences – everyone has the same potential to be creative.
Creativity is more important than ever as college and universities try to both emphasize diversity in their student population and seek future innovators in science, technology, engineering and math, otherwise known as the STEM fields. Including creativity helps accomplish both goals.
If early impressions of the Turning the Tide report are any indication, we could be heading into a pivotal time for college admissions. Such changes should not be limited to the scope of this landmark report. We need to be creative.
The term “college prep” as it relates to high school paths has a different meaning than when I was a teenager. The high school courses that I took that were “college prep” were designed to prepare me for higher education after I first earned my high school diploma. Today, it’s not uncommon for high school students to have several college credits before they walk across that graduation stage — and some may even have associate’s degrees. Dual enrollment, where students can simultaneously earn high school and college credits, is offered in schools across the country, and supported through legislation (and President Obama has been a vocal supporter of it).
While critics may say it’s just too much too soon for teens, I tend to lean the other direction. I think it’s important to zero in on what possible careers high school students may aspire to have as adults and to start them down the path early — before they have a chance to drop out and before life gets in the way.
Dual enrollment extends beyond traditional classroom settings, too. Virtual classes for both high school and college curriculum are available to teens and the ability to manage both is much more flexible with this setup. Recently, Coffee County Schools and Wiregrass Georgia Technical College (WGTC) announced a partnership called the Wiregrass Regional College and Career Academy that will give students in 11 Southern Georgia counties a chance to take classes from both a fully accredited virtual high school and college. Students will be able to earn their high school diploma AND a college associate’s degree at the same time — with state-mandated tests and exams proctored at locations throughout the area. What’s more — the program is FREE through the state’s Move on When Ready initiative. The schools will tap K-12 virtual learning curriculum Odysseyware for course completion.
Earning both a high school diploma AND a college degree at the same time is certainly not for every student – but should be an option for those who are ready to jump start their careers.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, during oral arguments in the affirmative action case, Fisher v University of Texas, on Wednesday, December 9, suggested,
There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well — as opposed to having them go to a less advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.
Justice Scalia is no stranger to controversy. In an earlier Supreme Court ruling upholding Obamacare tax credits for people on the federal exchange in June 2015, Justice Scalia was scathing in his dissent from the majority opinion.
Writing for The Conversation, Robert Schapiro, dean and professor of Law , Emory University, said:
When Justice Scalia gets mad, he does not hold back. He has often adopted fairly sharp language in his dissents but even by that standard, his dissent in King v Burwell is extraordinary in tone…. His vituperation reaches a crescendo in the conclusion where he snipes, “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”
Scholars and journalists alike have emphasized the seminal nature of the Fisher v University of Texas case. Indeed, a number of our contributors have argued that the case could exacerbate the racial tensions that have been evident through protests on campuses around the country.
Clearly, following this week’s oral arguments, the world of social media was on fire. Students and others tweeted at hashtag #scalia. Some even denounced Scalia’s comments with a hashtag of “#impeachscalia.”
Why the case is pivotal
Scholars argue that the judgment in the case will influence not only the admissions policies at UT, but in colleges and universities across the nation. And that could have consequences not just for diversity in education, but also for the educational success of students of color.
Liliana M Garces, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University, who served as counsel of record in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in support of the University of Texas at Austin when the case was before the court in 2012, said:
We might not think that admissions policies can have an influence on the work of administrators charged with supporting students of color once they are on campus, but findings from a more recent study suggest that the influence of these laws extend beyond the composition of the student body. Bans on affirmative action can have a detrimental influence on work that is critical to the success of students of color on campus.
Garces’ research also shows that after eight states banned affirmative action, via ballot initiatives and other measures, there was a drop in the number of students of color.
Before bans on affirmative action, for every 100 students matriculated in medical schools in states with bans, there were 18 students of color, whereas after the ban, for every 100 students matriculated, about 15 were students of color.
The case came before the Supreme Court after Abigail Fisher, a white female, applied to the University of Texas at Austin and was denied admission. She sued the university stating the university’s race-conscious admissions policy violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A lower court decided in UT’s favor.
In 2013, however, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court to conduct a more rigorous assessment of whether UT Austin needed to consider race in admissions.
Garces with her coauthor, Gary Orfield, a professor of education, law, political science and urban planning at University of California, Los Angeles, makes a strong argument that the decision in the case could affect affirmative action policy in higher education in general.
While the case raises questions specific to UT-Austin’s program, it is also possible that the Supreme Court may further limit the use of race in higher education admissions policies for institutions across the nation.
Other scholars underline the importance of looking at the historical context of the origins of affirmative action.
Franklin D Roosevelt was the first president to issue an executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in hiring defense contractors in 1943. But it was President John F Kennedy who, in an executive order in 1961, coined the term “affirmative action” to stop racial discrimination by government contractors. Subsequently, state and local governments, including universities, were inspired to introduce similar programs to promote equal opportunity.
In her article, Washington refers to the recent protests on campuses across the country. Black students continue to experience hostility because of their skin color.
Colleges and universities, she says, urgently need policies to address these challenges.
One such existing policy includes the limited consideration of race in admission decisions. This policy allows institutions to build a racially and ethnically diverse student body.
What is happening globally?
Policymakers in the US are not the only ones to have pushed for affirmative action.
Michele S Moses, professor of Educational Foundations and Policy, University of Colorado and Laura Dudley Jenkins, associate professor of Political Science, University of Cincinnati, argue that about one-quarter of the world’s other countries have some form of affirmative action for higher education. And many of these programs have emerged over the last 25 years.
A wide variety of institutions and governments on six continents have programs to expand admissions of non-dominant groups of students on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, class, geography, or type of high school. Several use a combination of these categories.
In fact, as they point out, “the United States’ affirmative action policies in higher education are not the oldest: India’s policies for lower caste students take that prize.”
And this should give policy makers in the US pause, “given that US policies are older than most, much of the cutting edge thinking on the topic is now coming from other parts of the world.”
We need to revolutionize STEM education in the United States. Why? According to the STEM (Science Technology, Engineering and Math) Coalition, there are 26 million STEM jobs in the U.S., comprising 20 percent of all jobs. By 2020, there will be 9.2 million STEM jobs in the U.S. Despite the need for these workers, only 45 percent and 30 percent of high school seniors are prepared for college-level math and science courses, respectively.
Because of this, a greater focus on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) learning has been a “trend” for at least the better part of a decade. This is another area where President Obama has weighed in. It is no longer enough for American students to just get by in comparison to each other in STEM subjects; global competition is proving that students in the U.S. need more focus in these subjects to lead the worldwide marketplace as adults. This year, expect teachers as early as pre-K to start putting as much emphasis on STEM learning as reading and letter formation.
In this article, we’ll discuss three ways we are revamping STEM education in the United States:
Here are three ways we are revamping STEM education in the United States:
Through technology: As the American K-12 system continues to look for ways to increase student interest and aptitude in STEM learning, technology is playing an increasingly pivotal role. Children who come to classrooms today have an inherent aptitude for technology and educators should encourage that skill set with resources that integrate STEM learning.
Teachers are looking for innovative ways to deliver STEM material. For example, thanks to virtual laboratories, a student can do an experiment multiple times, and learn from mistakes in real-time and make adjustments. It also means that experiments are not limited to a determined class time and can be done on a student’s schedule. With in-class mobile devices, a student with a tablet or smartphone in hand has a portal to hundreds of apps that support STEM learning.
With a focus on computer science: It’s estimated that in the next decade the number of computer science jobs in the U.S. will outnumber qualified people by 1 million. That’s 1 million jobs for the taking that Americans will miss out on because of inadequate skill sets. Despite this, only 10 percent of K-12 schools have computer science programs.
To meet the computer science job demand, K-12 schools will need help from outside partners. This could come in the form of area businesses willing to donate needed technology to make more classes happen or curriculum partnerships with groups like Code in the Schools. If every computer science classroom tries to re-invent the wheel, a lot of time and resources are wasted. So asking for help is the first step.
There also needs to be a larger focus on computer science at a younger age. This does not just mean computers and mobile devices available in K-12 classrooms but should include lessons on the “how” of the technology. The site Code.org has basic coding activities for children as young as Kindergarten – so teachers should be taking advantage of these resources. Waiting until middle or high school is simply too long to wait to spark an interest in K-12 students in computer science.
By getting girls interested in STEM from an early age. Special attention should be paid to getting young women interested in STEM courses. Research tells us that girls are just as adept as boys at learning STEM topics, computer science included, but their interest tends to drop off in late elementary or middle school.
Over twice as many boys in high school take computer science advanced placement tests than girls every year. It is not uncommon for the boys at STEM high schools to outnumber the girls by three to one. Yet the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the job outlook in STEM fields is expected to grow at double the rate of other fields. The jobs of today, and the future, are in science, technology, engineering and math. Girls need the encouragement to seek out these career paths that may not seem appealing in the socially-centric middle school years.
Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list of what we can do to improve STEM education in our country. What do you think are some ways to prepare our students better for these demanding careers?
Decades of data show girls outscoring boys on a range of language skills. Four ELA teachers share their best practices for closing the gap.
A guest post by Dr. Jackie Arnold
“Girls are better readers than boys” is an educational generalization that happens to be backed up by decades of data. According to the 2015 “Brown Center Report on American Education” from The Brookings Institution:
Girls outscore boys on practically every reading test given to a large population. And they have for a long time. A 1942 Iowa study found girls performing better than boys on tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and basic language skills. Girls have outscored boys on every reading test ever given by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the first long-term trend test was administered in 1971—at ages nine, 13, and 17.
Given this reality, our task as educators is to do our best to spark boys’ interest in reading and keep them at it. For some advice on how to make this idea a reality in the classroom, I asked teachers from Salem Community Schools in Indiana to share their best practices.
Find Out What They’re Interested In
According to fifth-grade teacher Bev Sweeney, “The boys especially like the sports and vehicle stories and the gross and silly, plus mysteries.” Fourth-grade teacher Melissa Nicholson said that, when her boys are allowed to choose what they read, “the ‘gross and scary’ books are some of their favorites.”
Boys are also engaged by stories that they are familiar with, said Amy Collins. “As a fourth-grade teacher, I find it easy to find reading lessons that interest boys in my classroom, due to the fact that we study Indiana history and we focus on Native Americans, the Civil War, and the American Revolution. My students love to tie our Social Studies and reading together.”
Fifth-grade Language Arts teacher Susan L. Shields relies on the power of great characters. “It is important to ‘hook’ young readers by offering them interesting characters to which they can relate,” she said. “The students in my classroom love the characters developed by Gertrude Chandler Warner in The Boxcar Children series, as well as the characters brought to life by Beverly Cleary in the Henry and Beezus books. The students come to view these characters as their ‘book friends’ and are truly sorry when the book ends because they have to tell their ‘friends’ goodbye.” And, she added, “Offering boys characters of similar age and gender will usually increase the amount of independent reading boys are willing to do.”
All ELA teachers at Salem use the personalized learning environment myON,which helps students find books they’ll like by having them complete an “interest inventory.” The system then delivers a selection of books geared to the individual student. Of course, finding an engaging book is one thing, but getting boys to read the whole thing is another.
Keep Them Motivated
Sweeney said that her secret to making boys want to keep reading is to “read a portion of a book to them and stop when they want to hear more.”
Once a boy starts reading a book, Shields monitors whether it too hard for him by giving benchmark assessments from time to time. And, she said, “Because myON offers a quiz at the end of each book along with quick results, students earn tickets from our classroom economy for each correct answer. This also serves as motivation.”
During reading groups, Nicholson motivates students by having them listen to or read books with a friend. “The boys especially like this,” she said, “due to getting to work with a buddy. Also, the different voices used in the stories really pull in my readers to engage them in the plot.”
Shields also gives the students in her Language Arts class 10 to 15 minutes a day for silent, sustained reading. She uses the website Book Adventuredaily to assess boys’ comprehension of the chapter books they choose.
Giving boys a choice of reading material and the support they need to get through it has paid off for Shields. In her class, she said, “boys are reading as much as or more than the girls. The average number of tests passed on Book Adventure for the boys in my class is 5.9 for the year. The average number of books for the girls is 5.0.”
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Dr. Jackie Arnold is the Director of Assessment and Program Improvement at Salem Community Schools (IN).
