- D.C. Schools Create Panel to Tackle Bullying
- Simmons: Anti-Bullying Panel is the Wrong Approach to the Problem
- Sunday Dialogue: How to Rate Teachers
- Story Time To Go: Libraries Try to Reach Kids Who Aren’t Being Read to at Home
- Why Bilinguals Are Smarter
The Washington Examiner
By Liz Essley
March 18, 2012
D.C. Public Schools is creating a broad-based panel to battle the pervasive childhood problem of bullying.
The committee, composed of 40 DCPS principals, staff, superintendents and community experts, will identify schools' strengths and weaknesses in preventing bullying and will research how to deal with the issue and come up with anti-bully initiatives.
It's a first for Washington, which remains the only "state" besides South Dakota not to enact anti-bullying legislation.
Nearly 10 percent of D.C. high school students and 28 percent of middle school students reported being bullied on school property within a year of a 2010 survey. At every middle school in D.C., at least 60 percent of students said they were "made fun of for the way they look or talk" often or sometimes. And more than half of middle school students said fights occurred "often" or "sometimes" -- Eliot-Hine and Shaw were at the top of the list, with 81 and 80 percent, respectively.
"Not only is bullying an intolerable threat to student safety, it also has collateral consequences," said Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. "If students don't feel safe at school, it creates a barrier to their pursuit of a quality education."
DCPS pointed to its LGBTQ Steering Committee as proof that the new group could help bring change to schools.
"It's imperative that we provide clear guidance to principals so they can respond consistently to bullying behaviors and make recommendations for age-appropriate interventions," Henderson said.
School reform advocates said the new committee was a good first step.
"For [Henderson] to really try to systematize [the issue] in a very thoughtful way I think is very great," said HyeSook Chung of DC Action for Children. "I think it can be very problematic if it's left to each of the schools to define, and I think there needs to be some uniformity of what bullying is and how to address it."
Henderson announced the creation of the committee after a screening of the documentary "Bullying," hosted by the Motion Picture Association of America.
The committee has scheduled its first meeting for Wednesday.
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
March 16, 2012
The chancellor of D.C. Public Schools announced Friday that she has pulled together an Anti-Bullying Advisory Committee and that it will hold its first monthly meeting on March 21.
The mission of the panel — whose members will include about 40 principals, central-administration and other school-based staff, as well as community experts (a catch-all term if ever there were one) — is to:
• Identify the school system’s strengths and limitations in preventing and managing bullying.
• Review best practices and research.
• Develop a comprehensive framework and plan for anti-bullying initiatives.
Chancellor Kaya Henderson made it to first base when, in a statement released Friday she said, “If students don’t feel safe at school, it creates a barrier to their pursuit of a quality education.”
But citing data from the 2010 Youth Risk Behavior Survey to support the need for an anti-bully panel suggests she also hit a panic button when there is no cause for alarm.
According to Ms. Henderson, nearly 10 percent of traditional high school students reported being bullied on school property in the last 12 months, while 27 percent of middle school students felt bullied. “Additionally,” the statement said, “over 10 percent of students reported being electronically bullied (also known as cyberbullying) in the last 12 months.”
Those stats show cause for concern not alarm.
There is cause for alarm with Ms. Henderson’s approach.
First, the anti-bullying panel is scheduled to meet just four school days after the announcement, suggesting the chancellor has been working out of the eyesight and earshot of parents, clergy and neighborhood leaders — who are the true community experts.
Second, children and older youths can be more turf-oriented than adults. For example, close an inner-city school without parental and community buy-in and force students to venture into others’ neighborhoods and you’ll find yourself looking for fresh batteries for that panic button (Think Anacostia High after Eastern High closed, and Hart Middle School after PR Harris closed).
Third, children call other kids out their names all the time, and that usually doesn’t stop unless a parent or other adult disciplinarian says, “Hey, stop it.”
Fourth, teens and young adults circulate in cliques of a natural class or ethnic strata, or, as young ones, move in contrived circles devised at the hands of their parents. Sometimes they are school- or faith-based cliques, and sometimes they are merely outings scheduled for routine romps in a neighborhood park or quiet times at the neighborhood library.
I point out those four real-life issues not because they are independent occurrences but because they make up the whole cloth of how children react to other children.
Change any or all of those dynamics and Ms. Henderson and her panel could disrupt the health, education and welfare of a generation of children as young as 2 and young adults as old as 21 — and without any support or buy-in.
The likely result of the Henderson panel’s framework is either more children will be suspended or kicked out of school and/or the school system will begin the paper trail so the “bullies” land behind bars.
Either way, the chancellor will be creating “a barrier to their pursuit of a quality education.”
The New York Times
Letters to the Editor
March 17, 2012
Readers react to an educator’s ideas for fairer evaluations.
The Letter
To the Editor:
Over the past year states have scrambled to rewrite their teacher evaluation procedures to satisfy federal demands. Because the main thrust of the new procedures is to remove ineffective teachers and, perhaps, reward superior ones, their key element is “value added” test scores — measuring how much students’ scores have improved.
But they are also stuffed with multiple observations, often by different observers, long lists of criteria and lengthy written reviews. So freighted, they are not only unfair but also unworkable. There must be a better way.
What schools need are not only simpler and more flexible plans, but also evaluators with enough time and the expertise to do the job. At the elementary level, finding them should be relatively easy: appoint good principals and free them from bus duty and never-ending out-of-school meetings. In high schools, where principals have large numbers of teachers and numerous subject areas under their supervision, the evaluators should be department heads.
As for the evaluation process itself, it needs to be yearlong, with evaluators working alongside teachers and observing many different lessons. Thus, they will see what good teachers do: grading papers at lunchtime, coming in early to tutor a struggling student, staying late to meet with a worried parent, inspiring students to learn more than required.
Primarily, however, states would do well to abandon their obsession with student test scores. As many critics have observed, too many factors beyond a teacher’s control influence those numbers. But an even bigger problem is teaching to the test. With so much weight given to the scores in new evaluations, only a few brave teachers will be able to resist concentrating on tests. As a result, real student learning will decline sharply, along with good teaching.
JOANNE YATVIN
Portland, Ore., March 13, 2012
The writer is a retired teacher and elementary school principal and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Readers React
I suppose I’m one of the “brave” teachers Ms. Yatvin described, those who aren’t swayed to teach to a standardized test. My goal has always been to challenge my students, no matter their level, and I have been rewarded with the best reading scores in my school for the past three years. So it should probably not come as a surprise that I think testing or some other sort of independent measure of the students’ abilities should be a component of teacher evaluations, an opinion that puts me in the minority of my profession.
However, should test scores be a majority of the evaluation? Absolutely not. There are too many factors outside of the teacher’s skills that contribute to a child’s performance on that one test on that one day. There should be multiple observations, as Ms. Yatvin advocated, but I have another idea: What about the opinion of next year’s teacher? Were the students adequately prepared for his or her class? Did they come in with the base of knowledge that was expected of them?
SCOTT STERLING
St. Petersburg, Fla., March 14, 2012
Evaluation is not a spreadsheet. It is a conversation. The point is not to stamp a teacher with a number. You can never bully a teacher into caring for children.
We need to promote collaboration, not competition. Teachers should be constantly given feedback by their colleagues, students and administrators.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “Outliers,” explains the “10,000-hour rule,” claiming that the key to success in any field is a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. Likewise, teachers don’t reach their peak until several years on the job.
Parents are putting their greatest treasure in the hands of teachers for 180 days a year. Let’s start treating teachers as nation-builders.
NIKHIL GOYAL
Woodbury, N.Y., March 14, 2012
The writer is a high school student.
Oh pshaw, here we go again, another educator decrying objective student testing in favor of subjective “evaluations” by school leaders and peers. And then these educators lament the imprecise and subjective nature of the evaluations.
The only way to properly measure teacher success is by student progress. Don’t we measure the success of car salesmen by how many cars they sell? Or physicians by the number of correct diagnoses and successful procedures? Why should teachers be any different?
And let’s label the criticism of “teaching to the test” as the smokescreen that it is. After all, how better to measure math skills than by doing math problems and having them reviewed by teachers? And how better to measure reading comprehension than by reading and asking students to explain what they have read?
DICK LESLIE
New York, March 15, 2012
Like so many other observers of the problem, Ms. Yatvin ignores the best source of information about teacher effectiveness — students. In all my years of teaching English and writing I have never seen better judges of teachers.
My experience with student evaluations — most, admittedly, poorly designed — defies the reflexive charge that teachers can buy good reports by being entertaining or easy graders. Young people can see through such ruses and are, as a group, embarrassingly honest.
In my opinion, hacking into the hallway grapevine would be more effective than “value added” testing plus administrator visits.
ROBERT J. MORRIS
Lansing, Mich., March 14, 2012
While there is much discussion about whether and how to evaluate teachers, perhaps we need to broaden the discussion to evaluating parents. I’m sure there are many teachers who would like to comment on whether the parents are fulfilling their responsibility to get the kids to school on time, well rested and ready to learn; to teach their children to be respectful of the teachers and other students; to ensure that their children are doing their homework to the best of their ability; to take an active interest in their child’s performance and behavior at school; and accept their share of the responsibility to educate their children and prepare them to be contributing members of society.
We expect so much from our teachers and too often underreward the good ones who put their heart and soul into their jobs against difficult odds. It’s time that the parental role becomes more prominent in our discussions about improving education.
THERESA FOSTER
Houston, March 14, 2012
I agree with much of Ms. Yatvin’s premise, but would add that the evaluators have to know what they are looking for. I have worked with school systems to help bring a modified corporate approach to teacher performance management and evaluation. This starts with a consistently applied and clearly defined set of standards for a “good” teacher. This will lessen the reliance on test scores, which are acknowledged to be a flawed indicator of a teacher’s expertise. It will also reduce the likelihood that evaluators will judge a teacher by “gut feeling” when they can point to an accepted and vetted set of parameters.
Lewis Carroll wrote, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.” We need to provide evaluators with a roadmap to evaluate teacher performance accurately. Only then can we undertake the important job of improving teacher performance.
RONALD M. KATZ
New Rochelle, N.Y., March 14, 2012
The writer is president of a human resources consulting firm.
It takes a skilled and intelligent administrator to perceive that a variety of teaching styles can be effective. To rate teachers in a cookie-cutter way removes the joy and excitement of creativity from a teacher’s approach.
No student has ever thanked me for helping him or her to achieve good standardized test scores. Instead, students say I made learning fun, or taught them to love learning.
MARILYN GILBERT
Port Washington, N.Y., March 14, 2012
Ms. Yatvin’s suggestions for teacher evaluation are excellent. But why are The Times and many others, including federal bureaucrats, suddenly so interested in teacher evaluation?
It is because of the belief that poor teaching is the reason that American schools are failing. The perception that our schools are failing, however, is based on American students’ international test scores. Rarely mentioned is the finding that middle-class American students in well-funded schools score at the top of the world on these tests. Our overall scores are unspectacular because we have one of the highest percentages of children living in poverty among all industrialized countries. The problem is thus not teacher quality. The problem is poverty — poor diet, poor health care and little access to books. Quality teaching has little effect when students are hungry, sick and have nothing to read.
Let’s improve teacher evaluation, but there is no evidence that there is a teaching crisis in the United States.
STEPHEN KRASHEN
Los Angeles, March 14, 2012
The writer is professor emeritus at the Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California.
Politicians and the public would do well to heed the warning that concludes Ms. Yatvin’s insightful letter. The more we rely on test scores to evaluate teachers, the less students will actually learn.
Teachers who are creative feel stultified by test prep. The inordinate time teachers must spend to make sure their students do well on the all-important test takes away from a rich, balanced curriculum.
Students who are poor test-takers but have the potential to succeed in higher education and job training are demoralized by the emphasis on standardized tests. Our brightest students get the message that if you can write in a formulaic manner and ace a test, you have fulfilled an important goal.
I can’t tell you how many times my students have asked, “Is this going to be on the test?”
As a longtime high school English teacher, I lament that the profession I love and have devoted my life to has come to this. If I must be judged on scores, and not on my ability to inspire students to love learning, to love literature and learn about life from it, and to find their writer’s voice, it’s a sad day for all of us.
SUSAN ARPAJIAN JOLLEY
Delran, N.J., March 14, 2012
The Writer Responds
In reading these letters from across the country, I appreciate the differences in the writers’ views on teacher evaluation. Yet I suspect that we are all influenced by our own experiences. Perhaps in some cases the writers’ students come from strong home backgrounds while in others they are handicapped by poverty.
As a principal I worked first at a school in a wealthy community with highly educated families, and later at one in a rural area where many students lived in rundown houses or a trailer park. Because test scores for the first school had always been high and remained so, the teachers and I were reluctant to take credit. But in the second, where we saw strong gains from lower to higher grades, we felt that our teaching made the difference.
At both schools I evaluated teachers by working closely with them throughout the year and seeing their strengths and weaknesses. Neither they nor I panicked when an occasional lesson fell flat. I hesitate to support the preset standards for evaluation that Mr. Katz advocates. Like Nikhil Goyal, the high school student, I believe, “Evaluation is not a spreadsheet. It is a conversation.”
Since retiring, I have been supervising student teachers and doing observational research in a number of schools. Although I still see much excellent teaching and students who are lapping up learning, I also notice deterioration in teacher confidence and student enthusiasm, which I attribute to too much testing and teachers’ feeling that they are no longer in charge of their classrooms.
JOANNE YATVIN
Portland, Ore., March 16, 2012
The Washington Post
By Christian Davenport
March 18, 2012
She comes prepared for the road shows, her voice diving deep and stentorian the way an elephant’s might. She’s also ready to hit the high notes, like the squeaky falsetto of a little piggy.
Renee Edwards, a librarian in Fairfax County, can pitter-patter like the rain, fingers falling like drops from the sky. She can bring the thunder with the stomp-stomp-stomp of her feet. Page after page, sound effect after sound effect, she turns the children’s book “Are You Ready to Play Outside?” into performance art and keeps the 3- and 4- year-olds at her feet totally engaged, enraptured one moment, convulsing with laughter the next.
The show is story time, a long tradition at libraries everywhere. But Edwards takes her act beyond the hush of the stacks to community centers, Head Start classrooms and, as on this day, day-care centers.
It would be nice if all the children who need to read — or be read to — came to the library. But the truth is they don’t. So the libraries are trying to go to them.
Armed with new research that validates what many have thought for years about the urgency of early literacy — that reading to children opens their minds, enriches their vocabularies, gets them ready to learn in school and helps keeps them from dropping out of high school later — libraries in recent years have expanded the role they play in the education of young children, some so young they are still learning to crawl.
In addition to going out into the community, libraries are beefing up collections geared toward babies between 6 and 18 months old, and they are developing programs designed to teach parents and caregivers the most effective ways to read to children.
“Early literacy has gotten increasing attention, which is really important because it points out the role public libraries play in helping children get ready for success in school,” said Mary Fellows, president of the Association of Library Service to Children. “Public libraries in many communities are the only game in town for these children.”
But the move comes as libraries budgets are being slashed, and the programs — deemed by some librarians as the most important work they can do, especially in disadvantaged communities — are limited.
In the District, for example, where the library budget has been slashed so much that last year the system considered closing its main facility on Sundays, branches drastically cut back the number of visits to day-care centers and classrooms, from 2,444 in fiscal 2010 to 1,100 last year, according to a spokesman.
“In the last couple of years, we have not had the funds to be able to continue a good many of our outreach activities,” said Ginnie Cooper, chief librarian of the D.C. Public Library system. “We need to focus on keeping our libraries open as many hours as possible.”
An increasing number of children between birth and 5 years old are coming to the District’s libraries, however, where there are an increasing number of baby books and programs such as STAR (Sing, Talk and Read), where parents learn to interact with their children. Recently, the library has taken its STAR program to high schools with teenage mothers. Last year, more than 115,000 children ages 5 and younger attended library programs, up from 89,000 the year before.
In the past, libraries generally “didn’t expect to see kids until they were 3 or 4 and could sit quietly while they were read to,” Cooper said. “Now we’re happy to see kids as young as 6 months old. . . . We really think of ourselves as the first classroom for children and are pleased to play that role.”
Libraries are increasingly being used as resource centers for new parents. In May, the Oxon Hill Library in Prince George’s County is kicking off a school readiness program, developed by the Maryland State Department of Education, called “Healthy Beginnings.”
Parts of some libraries don’t even look like libraries anymore; they look like day-care centers or even theme parks for toddlers. In Baltimore County, for example, two library branches have “Storyville,” free interactive early literacy learning centers within the library that are exclusively for children younger than 5. They are child-size villages with play grocery stores, construction zones and theaters that promote language development and social skills.
The first Storyville was so popular — officials say it routinely attracts people from out of state — that the county spent $1.7 million to build another in 2010. There are caves and treehouses and a baby park, logs to climb through, toys and dolls and stuffed animals. In other words, they are nothing like a library. Which is the point.
Edwards, the Fairfax librarian, starts her story times with a hello song and has the children play a game where they touch their
noses and toes. It ends in raucous applause. She encourages questions and answers — the more animated the feedback, the better.
“I work in a building with lots of books,” she said at one point. “What’s it called?”
“A LIBRARY!” one of the children bellowed.
Her technique of engaging children by constantly asking them questions about the characters in the book — “Why are they sad?” she asked. “Because it’s raining!” the children answered — is exactly what some libraries are trying to teach parents and caregivers.
Using a grant, the D.C. library system has recently started what’s called a Family Literacy Involvement Program, which helps parents read to children by providing interactive books and learning kits developed by the Children’s Museum of Houston.
In a city where, according to a 2007 study, 35 percent of the population is functionally illiterate, the real challenge is getting out to the people who don’t typically use the library.
Micki Freeny, the D.C. library’s coordinator of youth services, has talked to social service agencies and nurses who visit at-risk homes, trying find to children in need of help. But she says the system still hasn’t figured out how best to reach them.
“We haven’t cracked that yet,” Freeny said. “It’s definitely a challenge.”
The New York Times
By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
March 17, 2012
SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.
This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.
They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.
Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins — one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle.
In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin marked with a conflicting color. The bilinguals were quicker at performing this task.
The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.
Why does the tussle between two simultaneously active language systems improve these aspects of cognition? Until recently, researchers thought the bilingual advantage stemmed primarily from an ability for inhibition that was honed by the exercise of suppressing one language system: this suppression, it was thought, would help train the bilingual mind to ignore distractions in other contexts. But that explanation increasingly appears to be inadequate, since studies have shown that bilinguals perform better than monolinguals even at tasks that do not require inhibition, like threading a line through an ascending series of numbers scattered randomly on a page.
The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompea Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.
The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age (and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life).
In a 2009 study led by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, 7-month-old babies exposed to two languages from birth were compared with peers raised with one language. In an initial set of trials, the infants were presented with an audio cue and then shown a puppet on one side of a screen. Both infant groups learned to look at that side of the screen in anticipation of the puppet. But in a later set of trials, when the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen, the babies exposed to a bilingual environment quickly learned to switch their anticipatory gaze in the new direction while the other babies did not.
Bilingualism’s effects also extend into the twilight years. In a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism — measured through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language — were more resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: the higher the degree of bilingualism, the later the age of onset.
Nobody ever doubted the power of language. But who would have imagined that the words we hear and the sentences we speak might be leaving such a deep imprint?
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a staff writer at Science.
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