- Teaching the Next Generation Financial Literacy [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
- D.C. Council halts rental fees for parent-run school enrichment programs
- Non-fiction vs. fiction smackdown
Teaching the Next Generation Financial Literacy [Two Rivers PCS mentioned]
The Washington Informer
By Dawnyela Meredith
October 15, 2012
In today's economy, nearly everyone wishes that his or her personal finances were a little bit stronger. It was recently revealed that household net worth has been set back 20 years, according to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finance. Financial literacy has never been a more important skill and will be even more critical for the next generation.
Unfortunately, many children are not getting the financial literacy education they will need as adults. The Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy's most recent national survey, which measures the financial literacy in high schools, found that seniors answered just 48.3 percent of the financial literacy questions correctly.
Compared to other countries, things do not look any better. Currently, American students rank behind their peers in Mexico, Australia and Brazil in their knowledge of financial literacy and basic concepts like interest rates and budgeting money, according to Visa International Financial Literacy Barometer 2012.
I partner with a public charter school in Washington D.C that teaches financial literacy. The school has taught financial literacy for the past five years, partnering with the Alliance of Securities and Financial Educators—on whose board sits members of the Securities and Exchange Commission. ASAFE volunteers use a program called the Junior Achievement curriculum and model which is a good fit for the school's educational program which is based on Expeditionary Learning, which emphasizes learning by solving problems as a superior approach to rote learning.
Educators at our school believe that adults not talking to children about money cause financial illiteracy. Unfortunately, in too many families, talking about money is still seen as a taboo topic—or something that young people do not need to know about.
Through our six-week financial literacy program, we want to break through that barrier. The program begins with students learning the basics of budgeting, and the impact of interest rates on savings and purchasing things on credit. Along the way, students are tested by activities and competitions to reinforce what they have learned.
After students learn the basics, they next tackle more complex financial situations. As the program ends, students learn how to pull together resources to set up and operate a student-run store. In the past, this has enabled students to get real experience making decisions about whether it is the right time to expand, and learn the true costs of buying something on credit.
Our goal is to have students leave the program with an understanding of the power and risks of money. We aim to create a foundation from which they can learn to become savers, and grasp the risks and the benefits of credit.
In addition to learning an important new subject, financial literacy reinforces the lessons students absorb in math class, including the real world value of concepts like fractions and percentages. Because Two Rivers believes in making character education a key part of learning, financial literacy classes are used to highlight the importance of hard work and making responsible choices.
Our commitment to teaching financial literacy is one reason why Two Rivers' students perform strongly on the city's standardized math tests. In the District's 2012 standardized tests, Two Rivers came first in math and second in reading among all D.C. charter elementary campuses. Overall, our elementary school scored 21 percentage points higher than the average D.C. charter school and 29 percentage points higher than the average D.C. traditional public school. Our middle school scored 25 points higher than the average city-run school and 17 points higher than the average charter.
Two Rivers also was recently recognized as one of only 22 'high performing' public charter schools by the city's Public Charter School Board, because of its strong test results.
One of the reasons we are able to make a commitment to teaching financial literacy is that, as a public charter school, Two Rivers has greater freedom to set curriculum and school culture than its counterparts in D.C.'s traditional public school system.
Faced with budgetary problems, too many school districts are cutting back on teaching financial literacy. The financial collapse of 2008, when many adults counted the cost of their own financial illiteracy, shows us why that decision is a mistake. If we want to prepare today's students for the challenges and opportunities they will face tomorrow, we as adults need to provide the financial literacy education they will need.
D.C. Council halts rental fees for parent-run school enrichment programs
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
October 17, 2012
The District’s Department of General Services may no longer collect rent from parents who run enrichment programs in the city’s public schools, under emergency legislation passed unanimously Tuesday by the D.C. Council.
Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) said she introduced the bill to prevent well-meaning parents “from receiving surprise charges from DGS for using their own school buildings.”
Cheh was acting in response to complaints from parents at Lafayette Elementary, who this fall discovered they would be charged $1,000 per month to operate a before-school foreign-language program for nearly 90 kids.
DGS had recently reduced the fee to $400 per month, a fee parent organizers said was still prohibitively expensive.
Parent organizers of the Lafayette program were thrilled by the council’s action, saying they hadn’t budgeted for the fee and would have had to end the program if forced to pay.
“This is fantastic news!” parent organizer Julie Stewart wrote in an e-mail.
“As taxpayers, we’re paying for the lights to be on and the buildings to be heated between 8:00 am and 4:30 pm, anyway,” she wrote, “so why not let us use the school buildings to offer our kids language programs, chess, math, book clubs, dance, basketball and a host of other enrichment programs?”
City officials have said outside groups have always had to pay for the use of space in public schools and that fees help defray security, custodial and other costs. But it’s not clear how widely and evenly the policy has been enforced.
The emergency bill stops DGS from charging parents rent only this school year. It calls for department officials to establish rules to go into effect next school year governing the process by which parent groups should secure permission to use building space and the amounts they may be charged.
Non-fiction vs. fiction smackdown
The Washington Post
By Jay Matthews
October 18, 2012
Among the most disturbing facts about U.S. schools is that 17-year-olds have shown no significant improvement in reading since 1980.
The new Common Core State Standards in 46 states and the District are designed to solve that problem. Among other things, students are being asked to read more non-fiction, considered the key to success in college or the workplace.
The Common Core is one of our hottest trends. Virginia declined to participate, but was ignored in the rush of good feeling about the new reform. Now, however, the period of happy press conferences is over and teachers have to make big changes. That never goes well. Expect battles, particularly in this educationally hypersensitive region.
Teaching more non-fiction will be a key issue. Many English teachers don’t think it will do any good. Even if it was a good idea, they say, those who have to make the change have not had enough training to succeed—an old story in school reform.
The clash of views is well described by two prominent scholars for the Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based public policy group, in a new paper. Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas and Mark Bauerlein of Emory University say the reformers who wrote the Common Core standards have no data to support their argument that kids have been hurt by reading too much fiction. They say analyzing great literature would give students all the critical thinking skills they need. The problem, they say, is not the lack of non-fiction but the dumbed-down fiction that has been assigned the last several decades.
“Problems in college readiness stem from an incoherent, less-challenging literature curriculum from the 1960s onward. Until that time, a literature-heavy English curriculum was understood as precisely the kind of pre-college training students needed,” Bauerlein and Stotsky say.
Supporting the new standards is a movement to improve children’s reading abilities by replacing elementary school pablum with a rich diet of history, geography, science and the arts. University of Virginia scholar E.D. Hirsch Jr. has written several books on this. He established the Core Knowledge Foundation in Charlottesville to support schools that want their third graders studying ancient Rome and their fourth graders listening to Handel.
Robert Pondiscio, a former fifth grade teacher who is vice president of the foundation, quotes a key part of the Common Core standards making this case:
“By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.”
The Common Core guidelines recommend fourth graders get an equal amount of fiction and non-fiction. Eighth grade reading should be about 55 percent non-fiction, going to a recommended 70 percent by 12th grade.
Bauerlein and Stotsky say this will hurt college readiness. The new standards and its tests, they say, will make “English teachers responsible for informational reading instruction, something they have not been trained for, and will not be trained for unless the entire undergraduate English major as well as preparatory programs in English education in education schools are changed.”
Pondiscio says he admires Bauerlein and Stotsky and doesn’t see why English classes have to carry the non-fiction weight. Social studies and science courses can do that. The real battle, he says, will be in the elementary schools, where lesson plans have failed to provide the vocabulary, background knowledge and context that make good readers.
Those who want the new standards say learning to read is more than just acquiring a skill, like biking riding. It is absorbing our world. That is what the fight in your local district will be about.