I’ve been supportive of national education reforms that track nearly all students into a college prep curriculum, regardless of their ambition. Marketplace realities — where sophisticated literacy skills are required to cope with training required for many blue collar jobs — should be the guide. But considering the dropout rates, especially among boys, proposals such as this from Louisiana have me rethinking this.
Let’s hope that we’re starting to see the fruits of Arne Duncan’s plan to shut down low performing charter schools while ramping up the good ones. Here’s a bad charter getting shut down in Philadelphia. Based on my travels, elite charters present the best opportunity for helping urban students, especially boys, but charter authorizers have to be ruthless about terminating the low performers, as Andy Rotherham and I argued in US News.
I’m not sure what the Seattle Public Education Examiner is, or even where this writer is headed, but there are a couple of links worth pursuing.
Catalyst Magazine lays out the numbers on suspensions: One in four black boys suspended at least once during the previous school year. The assumption that these young men are merely bringing the street life into school is not entirely accurate. When schools allow these young men to slip behind (and literacy skills are the best indicator here), acting out is preferable to looking dumb.
From the Catalyst (photo courtesy of Catalyst):
Black male conundrum
In Chicago’s public schools, African-American males are suspended and expelled at a higher rate than any other student group. Yet educators are working to raise black male graduation rates, creating a classic case of policy and practice at odds.
by Sarah Karp
June, 2009
Nearly one in four black male students in Chicago Public Schools was suspended at least once last year, a rate that is twice as high as the district average.
MDRC, which produces some of the best social science research out there, has taken a crack at the DOE’s research concluding that the Reading First program was ineffective. I’ve always been convinced that the Reading First programs were both good for boys and effective for all students (while never doubting the program was run with a Mob mentality and deserving of a pimp slap from Congress).
Congress, of course, did more than that. The program is about to disappear, which means the reading money will get peddled out directly to school districts. In some cases, that’s a good thing. In other districts…watch for a decline in reading scores as they return to scattershot reading programs backed by third rate research.
So now is a good time to reconsider Reading First’s death sentence. A summary of the Reading First report:
Understanding Reading First
What We Know, What We Don’t, and What’s Next
Corinne Herlihy, James Kemple, Howard Bloom, Pei Zhu, and Gordon Berlin
In 2008, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education published research findings on Reading First, a centerpiece of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act that provided $1 billion per year to help all children read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. The findings were interpreted by many in the media and the policy community as saying that Reading First did not work. Although the story is more nuanced than that, funding for the program was eliminated in the fiscal 2009 spending bill that was signed by President Obama in March. NCLB is up for reauthorization in 2009. In the meantime, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides tens of billions of dollars to states and localities for spending on education, meaning that federal, state, and local policymakers face critical choices today about how best to use this money to support early reading instruction and achievement.
Getting Boys to Read lays out the facts and offers practical advice to parents and teachers. The U.S. Department of Education should have started quarterbacking efforts such as this years ago. And yet, not a single effort to date. Considering the evidence, that’s pretty amazing.
Here’s how this group (which seems to have a contingent from Rochester, N.Y., where I once worked as a newspaper reporter) describe themselves:
Getting Boys to Read is a website dedicated to supporting parents, teachers and librarians help boys learn to love reading. (This blogger happens to contribute to the site. She thinks it’s a worthy cause. ) The site was founded by librarian Mike McQueen, who is a school librarian in the great state of Colorado. The site provides informative articles, interviews, and a forum for discussion about all topics related to boys, reading, writing and other literacy-related topics. The site tackles national issues, like the serious literacy gap between boys and girls in the United States, strategies to help get boys reading, information about children’s author Jon Scieszka’s Guys Read Group, informative books reviews, and a host of other interesting information, as well.
Boys Literacy Skills are Suffering
Compared with girls, boys’ literacy skills across the country are floundering. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, teen females have increasingly outperformed teen males on literacy assessments since 1971. In the wake of feminism, local and national programs have ignored this serious literacy gender gap. There is a pressing need for parents and educators to a) be informed of this literacy gap and b) to gain understanding and knowledge as to WHY this gap and exists and how we can fix it. GettingBoystoRead.com is a great resource that informs parents and educators how approaches to help getting boys to love reading should differ from approaches to getting girls to love reading.
Rochester Boys and Literacy Problems
Rochester, whose city schools have among the lowest graduation rates in the country, is not immune to this national problem. If you look at individual school districts in Monroe County, you will see that females have consistently higher ELA and English Regents scores than their male counterparts. Visit the New York State Department of Education’s report cards of each school district. No matter WHAT THE DISTRICT, females perform at a higher rate.
When it comes to women in the workforce, the most commented-on indicators are the number of women in the Senate, White House and Fortune 500 leadership. Those indicators seem to move at a glacial pace. But that’s not where the big changes are taking place.
Anyone visiting a TV station would find that while there may be a male anchor, the backbone of the news team, the producers, for example, are almost all female. Here’s an another interesting example in today’s Washington Post — female FBI investigators in charge of white collar probes.
Women dominate university graduation ceremonies — 58%, on average. And more than 80% of the layoffs in the current recession involve men. Women now make up the majority of the workforce, economists report. It’s a fascinating social revolution, and mostly a positive one. But it remains a social revolution that still goes mostly unnoticed.
The Associated Press offers up an interesting story on Obama promoting fatherhood issues. The potential to do good is definitely there. My own take on this was the last editorial I wrote for USA Today before taking a buyout.
Here’s an attempt in Baltimore. The onset of the ”boy troubles” and the decline in the number of male teachers occurred at the same time, which should place that cause at the top of my suspect list. Hiring more male teachers would undoubtedly help; I’ve seen male teachers have a huge impact. Problem is, I’ve seen superior teaching by female teachers accomplish the same thing. Hey, having more male role models has to be a good thing. Just don’t assume any huge turnarounds if that should somehow happen.
From the Sun:
baltimoresun.com
Programs encourage male presence in schools
Fathers show up to give youngsters a wider range of role models, mentors
By John-John Williams IV | john-john.williams@baltsun.com
June 18, 2009
A group of seven fifth-graders clambered around the lunch table at Talbott Springs Elementary School in Columbia, eagerly awaiting their chance to arm-wrestle parent Mark Scott.
“Look at these guns,” Scott jokingly taunted the students as he pointed at his bicep.
Starting with his 10-year-old son, Jonathan, Scott gave each one of the students an opportunity to take a shot, with no success. The kids didn’t mind. And Scott loved every minute of it.
Let’s try that link to Tom Mortenson’s upcoming presentation one more time. Powerpoint presentations always give me trouble. If this doesn’t work, I’ll be back.
