- The Education Issue: Believing self-control predicts success, schools teach coping [DC Prep PCS mentioned]
- Creating capital citizens: César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy and civic education [Cesar Chavez PCS mentioned]
- City backs off private schools for special ed
The Education Issue: Believing self-control predicts success, schools teach coping [DC Prep PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Andrew Reiner
April 11, 2013
At first blush, Julia King’s middle-school classroom at D.C. Prep Public Charter School seems like any other middle school. Seventh-graders are busy reviewing math skills that they struggled with on a recent test. Walls are plastered with motivational posters: “Willpower, Improve, Never Give Up!” But look more closely. Something else is going on here — something that would have seemed more familiar to these 12- and 13-year-olds’ great-grandparents.
Fourth- through eighth-graders at this Northeast Washington school are expected in their seats by 8 a.m. No excuses. The children do not speak in the hallways or classroom unless spoken to by a teacher. They navigate the hallways single file. Throughout their eight-hour school day, they bring to each class charts on which they record, as the teachers decree, behaviors, both good and bad, listed on a key. This key lists 26 behaviors, A through Z. Failure to meet any of them results in detention.
During a math review, King, 2013 D.C. Teacher of the Year, blurts out: “Responsible ‘R.’ I see that you are listening.” On cue, students scribble an “R” beneath a column reading “RESPONSIBLE Behaviors.” Before class is over, King’s students will have also written an “I” for staying on task and a “B” for getting the teacher’s attention appropriately. At the end of class, students file out in silence. Two boys wearing green mesh pinnies over their navy-blue polo shirt leave last. They are serving in-school suspension.
The boot-camp expectations, the behavioral charts, the pinnies, all point to a calculated attempt to teach students self-discipline, focus, accountability — ultimately, self-control. Schools across the country are responding to a growing body of research that suggests a definitive and disturbing link between low levels of self-control in childhood and serious problems later in life. It’s hard to believe, but letting kids throw punches or text-message their days away or blow off academics can lead to a slew of mental and physical health woes in adulthood. Terrie Moffitt, a preeminent researcher in self-control, observed in a groundbreaking study that the need for self-control in 21st-century America is “not just for well-being but for survival.” As it turns out, our emotional lives matter as much, sometimes more, as our intellect in the path to success. And schools are exploring ways — from character-based education to mindfulness meditation to social emotional learning — to teach the challenging, essential ABCs of self-control.
It starts with Stay Puft
The study of self-control began in the 1960s with a marshmallow. The longitudinal Marshmallow Study (as it is still known) started at Stanford University and operated on a simple premise: Offer 653 4-year-olds a marshmallow, and tell them that if they waited to eat it after the researcher returned from leaving the room, then they could have a second one. If they couldn’t wait, they were stuck with just one. The study in delayed gratification revealed that the marshmallow resisters scored much higher on their SATs and, as they aged, remained thinner, less prone to drug addiction and to divorce than their counterparts who couldn’t master their salivary glands.
A spate of studies appeared in the past three years or so, particularly the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, and, almost overnight, the stakes seemed higher. The Dunedin study — headed by Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, Duke University psychology and neuroscience professors — followed 1,000 New Zealanders over 32 years, beginning at birth. What researchers observed in this study, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011, was astounding.
Children as young as 3 who showed lower self-restraint were much more likely to face future struggles with high cholesterol and blood pressure, periodontal disease, chronically empty savings accounts, debt and single parenthood. Those with less self-restraint had much higher incidences of drug and alcohol dependence. And “43% of least disciplined children had a criminal record by age 32, compared with just 13% of the most conscientious.” If this isn’t disturbing enough, “one generation’s low self-control disadvantages the next generation,” the researchers stated.
So much about the culture we live in seems to erode self-control, including chronic stress, multi-tasking and hyperkinetic images, which decrease our attention span, as well as the forms of social media that consume us. Imaging studies have shown that the brains of teens who hypertext (at least 120 times a day) lighted up like Christmas trees in the same neural regions as those of addicts on heroin. One worrisome fallout of lack of self-control is cheating. A 2012 study of 23,000 high school students found that 51 percent admitted to cheating on an exam. Conducted by the Center for Youth Ethics at the Josephson Institute, a nonprofit group that oversees the widely used Character Counts curriculum, the study also found that 20 percent admitted to stealing from stores and 76 percent said they had lied to parents about “something significant.” But that’s not the worst of it. In a 2010 version of the study, which is conducted every two years, 57 percent agreed with the statement that “In the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating.”
Character-based education
For many educators, the straightening of such disturbing swerves in integrity is found in character-based education. Once the philosophical flesh of Catholic and fundamentalist Christian schools, character-based education is creeping into the public sector. Developmental psychologist Thomas Lickona describes character education as the deliberate effort to curate moral qualities most people can get behind. Lickona, director of the Center for the Fourth and Fifth Rs (Respect and Responsibility) at SUNY Cortland’s School of Education, says these qualities include honesty, compassion, courage, kindness, self-control, cooperation and diligence. In an interview, Steve Johnson, director of character education at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, says that many at-risk kids hold a “self-destructive” vision of courage that promotes risk-taking for the sake of dangerous thrills. Courage has to be about “risk that promotes greater good, which justifies the danger,” he says.
At schools such as D.C. Prep, whose classrooms are largely filled with at-risk students, risk-taking means creating an environment where students start thinking about college in fourth grade. DCP administrators are too aware of the alarmingly high numbers of poor students who make it into college only to drop out. To this end, DCP has recruited teachers from middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds who know what it takes to make it in college. This translates into a school day that runs from 8 to 4, teachers on call until 8 p.m., and resources for graduates that few middle schools provide. Graduates can return for evening study halls twice a week, as well as counseling for college and financial aid applications.
This rigor also means behavioral expectations tinged in a Puritanical scarlet. Or green, in this case. Remember those students wearing green pinnies? They were suspended and still had to attend classes. They could not utter a word the entire day — nor could anyone speak to them — as they were banished to the back of the classroom and to the end of the hallway line. Such measures surely seem extreme. But Ibby Jeppson, DCP’s director of resource development, insists that the school teaches students an “agency over their own lives” and a better understanding of the “expectations of the broader culture” they hope to someday enter. “Yes, we sweat the small stuff around here,” Jeppson says.
In an e-mail, Jeppson says that the message needs to be clear to students and parents alike: “The small-stuff expectations are linked to important life skills: being on time, being dependable and being there every day, dressing appropriately.” It’s not uncommon for school administrators to make wake-up calls to chronically late students or to supply them with new alarm clocks. “Research shows that willpower and self-discipline are stronger predictors of success than pure intellectual talent,” Jeppson says.
Research is bearing out that the students who earn the highest grades often aren’t the ones with the highest IQs, but the ones working hardest. The grittiest students. A 2007 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology said gritty students muck through challenges “despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.” This, says Angela Duckworth, the University of Pennsylvania psychology professor who developed the “Grit Scale,” is what low-income students need to learn to earn college diplomas.
Mind(ful) your manners
Perhaps the fastest-growing technique in classrooms for teaching self-control begins with “om”: mindfulness. Mindfulness uses meditative breathing and focus to increase awareness of body and mind, and to decrease stress. The technique, borrowed from Buddhism, shows up in classrooms wearing sunglasses: Both actor Goldie Hawn and director David Lynch fund nonprofit organizations that bring mindfulness into schools, and the 2012 documentary “Room to Breathe,” about the struggle to save a dangerous San Francisco school through mindfulness, has drawn national attention.
Mindful Schools, an Oakland-based nonprofit, is featured prominently in this film. The group has introduced 30,000 schoolchildren to this practice, defined on its Web site as “sustained attention and noticing our experience without reacting.” Mindfulness teaches children how to focus their attention, manage their emotions, handle their stress and resolve conflicts through deep, purposeful breathing and reframing their thoughts in a nonjudgmental way.
It teaches empathy, as well, critical in a world of increasing intolerance, violence, bullying. “The more familiar a kid becomes with his or her own feelings, the more easily you can recognize and tolerate those feelings in someone else,” says Amy Saltzman, director for the Association for Mindfulness in Education. If a lot of this sounds like helium promises, consider that when Mindful Schools partnered with the University of California at Davis to see if this practice benefited inner-city children in three Oakland elementary schools, the results left a crater imprint: 84 percent of teachers believed their students calmed more easily, and 61 percent of students said they developed better focus in class.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health newsletter Adolescent Matters says the stress of impoverished life “triggers neurobiological events that can alter brain development, potentially impairing the stress response systems.” This “increases the chance that children will have more difficulty controlling their emotions.” This is a big reason researchers from the Prevention Research Center at Penn State University and Hopkins joined forces with the Holistic Life Foundation, a Baltimore nonprofit that teaches yoga to at-risk youth and teachers. This September the triumvirate will begin the second half of a study in which Holistic Life and educators bring yoga into six elementary and middle schools. “We’re taking the practice of the mat into their lives,” says Holistic Life co-founder Ali Smith.
For 24 weeks yoga instructors will teach meditative breathing, reflective discussion and what they call “talking points,” a form of self-dialogue. “We’re trying to break through stereotypes about survival for these kids,” says co-founder Andres Gonzalez. “We want them to understand that compassion and empathy can coexist in their lives, that they can help as tools for survival.” An example of what Gonzalez and Smith hope to accomplish is posted on the Mindful Schools’ Web site. An MS-trained student wrote: “I was sitting in a party with my friend. Two guys come over to us and they want to fight. My friend has a gun and he’s ready to use it. You know what I did? I’m sittin’ in the party doin’ a body scan. That’s right, a body scan. I breathed. Then I took my friend’s gun and walked out of the party.”
Social emotional learning
The third front on teaching self-control — social emotional learning, or SEL — is exactly what it sounds like. The brainchild of psychologist Daniel Goleman in the 1990s, SEL presumes that the answer to America’s education woes lies not in more standardized test prep but in considering the overlooked emotional needs of children. SEL curricula teach children greater self-awareness and empathy, as well as the steps for handling conflict constructively and for creating positive relationships with peers, teachers and their larger communities. It’s character-based education meets Mr. Rogers. Of the three approaches to teaching self-control, SEL is the one poised to make the biggest splash in mainstream public classrooms. The Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning Act of 2011 was introduced in Congress to spread the SEL gospel. The bill died in committee, but SEL inspired dedicated acolytes.
One is Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), the same Tim Ryan who wrote a book on mindfulness and spearheaded SEL programs in Ohio. Ryan and Roger Weissberg, head of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, are lobbying the Obama administration to include SEL in its new proposals to reduce school violence. Another acolyte is the NoVo Foundation, a New York nonprofit that is committed to funding people who strive for “sustainable,” “transformative” change. The amount that NoVo gives to CASEL varies each year; since 2008 the total has hovered near $14 million. Responsive Classroom is one of the most widely embraced blueprints for teaching SEL at the elementary school level. It follows the premise that children learn best and grow into responsible citizens when they are taught to cultivate their emotional, as well as intellectual, needs. A three-year longitudinal study by the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education compared children at three schools using the Responsive Classroom approach with those at three control schools. Responsive Classroom children showed greater increases in reading and math test scores on the Connecticut Mastery Test; teachers felt more effective in teaching discipline; teachers felt that they offered more high-quality instruction; and children felt more positive about school. Results from this study, conducted between 2001 and 2004, help explain why CASEL has partnered with citywide school systems for grades K-12 in Chicago, Cleveland, Austin and Anchorage.
Another SEL program takes place at PS 307 in Brooklyn. The pre-K through eighth-grade school developed its SEL program via NoVo grantee Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. Teachers use a 4Rs curriculum — Reading, Writing, Respect and Resolution — that dovetails with their language arts program. This means, through the lens of reading and writing, students in every grade receive training on how to manage anger, make decisions, deal with conflict and work collaboratively to improve the school community. On NoVo’s Web site, PS 307 teacher Martina Meijer says: “The process is transformative. The kids have grown tremendously since the beginning of the year in their ability to analyze their actions, predict consequences, and see other things they could have done.” Faculty members say lunchrooms and hallways are calmer, teachers and students interact better, and suspensions have dropped. Programs such as the 4Rs give Weissberg hope that Congress will revisit SEL legislation. “This is the future of education,” he says. “Persistence. Self-management. Problem-solving. This is what our kids need to learn.”
Creating capital citizens: César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy and civic education [Cesar Chavez PCS mentioned]
American Enterprise Institute
Richard Lee Colvin
April 10, 2013
Chukwuma Isebor, an 18-year-old high school student whose father immigrated to the United States from Nigeria for college, says that prior to his senior year he was cynical and distrustful "of the government and the way it treated lower-income citizens and minorities." Yet, there he was in December, arguing with two classmates before a panel of three judges that the patriotic spirit of the nation's founders could be revived and the quality of American democracy improved if citizens participated more actively.
Chukwuma, Joseline Barajas, and Chyna Winchester are seniors at the César Chávez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy campus on 12th Street Southeast in Washington, DC, 11 blocks east of the Capitol. They offered up their thoughts on citizenship and democracy as they participated in the annual "We the People" competition at their school. The nationwide competition, sponsored by the Center for Civic Education, tests students' knowledge of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights in a congressional hearing-style format. Teams research an opening statement that responds to questions on one of the competition's six themes and then answer queries from a panel of judges. The goal of the competition is to promote knowledge and appreciation of the Constitution as the foundation of democracy in the United States.
The three students and their classmates had spent several weeks preparing for the competition during American Government class, which all Chávez students are required to take and pass to graduate. The previous day, they had practiced their statements and answered questions posed to them by their teacher, Ayo Magwood, an economist who formerly worked as a researcher at the World Bank. She had urged all of them to include more specific illustrations and examples from contemporary politics, policies, and US Supreme Court cases. "Look for cases where executive power was checked or where federal power was checked," she told one group. "Don't worry about the Articles of Confederation," she told another group. "Get to the Constitution and current examples."[1]
When it was their turn to present their argument, Chukwuma, Joseline, and Chyna settled quickly and nervously into their seats at the front of the crowded classroom. The judges were a consultant with Deloitte, a policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and an enthusiastic former member of the US Coast Guard. The students were to discuss whether they agreed or disagreed with the idea that American democracy could be improved through the renewal of political institutions and citizen activism.
Joseline, a bright and outgoing student who takes care of her chronically ill mother and three younger siblings, was the first to speak. She said her team agreed that engaged citizenship and "a healthy skepticism of power can help keep our democracy strong because it can lead to people participating more and acting upon things they would like changed." At the beginning of the school year, Joseline had thought the government class would be boring. But much to her surprise, it turned out to be her favorite-so much so that she began sharing the civic knowledge she was learning with her mother, who was preparing to take her American citizenship test. Her mother also got hooked on the class and eagerly looked forward to her daughter's reports.
Next was Chukwuma, whose main interest when he came to Chávez was basketball. In his statement, he cited the work of Meira Levinson, a Harvard political philosopher whose latest book, No Citizen Left Behind (Harvard University Press, 2012), examines the gap in civic engagement and empowerment between low-income minority students and their more affluent peers. It is a problem he and his classmates, who are all African American or Hispanic, relate to, Chukwuma told the judges. Last fall, he was among a group of Chávez students who fanned out into the Capitol Hill neighborhood to register voters and found deep apathy.
He credited Magwood with broadening his views of the government and his ability to affect it. She "has shown me that, instead of just being mad at the government, and not participating in it, I can actually have a voice and do something about my placement and treatment in this country," he wrote in an email later. "I feel now that with hard work and diligence that you can move up in this country and improve the lives of yourself, others, and future generations. Though it may be harder for me because I am an African-American male, I still feel that I can accomplish great things and lead others to do the same."
Chukwuma said he plans to major in American and African American history when he goes to college. "I have always been intrigued by the way this country was founded, and how, in its history, leaders have tried to claim that they are upholding [American] values when, in actuality, they're not," his email continued. "Also, though, I like the way that this country allows people to protest their grievances and . . . express themselves without prosecution."
The third student to offer her views was Chyna, a quiet, thoughtful young woman who plans to major in performing arts at a community college in Western Maryland. She pointed to Martin Luther King Jr. as an example of how people can make a difference. "He protested nonviolently and questioned the government . . . and argued that things needed to be changed," she told the judges.In answering questions from the judges, Joseline, Chukwuma, and Chyna discussed the Electoral College, super PACs, and the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court case and their effects on voting. Other classes participating in the competition were having similar conversations throughout the battered former furniture warehouse that now houses Chávez's Capitol Hill campus. Students reflected on the importance of the Supreme Court's Marbury v. Madison decision establishing the concepts of judicial review and separation of powers between the courts and the executive branch, the influence of natural law philosophers on the founders, Second Amendment rights, the tension between liberty and security inherent in the Patriot Act, and federalism. In a classroom down the hall, a deep-voiced, serious senior named Tokumbo Adedeinde asserted that federalism and the balance of power between the central government and the states "was the greatest contribution of the Constitution to government."
After all of the groups finished their presentations, and while the judges huddled privately to pick the winners, Krista Fantin, a former Teach for America fellow who teaches the Advanced Placement US Government class at Chávez, reconvened her students to celebrate their efforts. Soon, the students were packed together in an excited scrum in the center of the room with Fantin in the middle, hugging, jumping, shouting, and dancing. "As a class together, we all did a good job," one student exulted. They were not celebrating a football or basketball championship.
Results from the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress civics exam showed that, on that score, there is not a lot to celebrate at many other schools. Only one in five eighth graders and only one in four 12th graders could demonstrate proficiency in their knowledge and understanding of the Constitution, the presidency, Congress, the courts, and how laws are made. Over one-third of 12th graders did not possess even a rudimentary understanding of topics such as how the Constitution reflects the "purposes, values and principles of American democracy."[2]
When the numbers are broken down by race and income level, they are even worse. Of white eighth graders in the United States, 29 percent are proficient, compared to only 9 percent of black students and 11 percent of Hispanic students. The disparities among 12th graders by race and ethnicity are nearly the same as they are by income level. A lack of knowledge translates into lower rates of voting. A study by Richard J. Coley and Andrew Sum for the Educational Testing Service concluded that "the nation's less-educated, lower-income and young adults have voluntarily disenfranchised themselves from the voting process."[3] Unsurprisingly, those groups reported paying hardly any attention to public affairs. This lack of awareness and participation "should be viewed as a fault line in the bedrock of the nation's democracy that must be addressed," the authors wrote.[4] Civic apathy "may lead to the ultimate death of democracy, or the moral and social decline of the state."[5] Chávez aims to teach its students to reverse these trends.
The Northwest Current
By Elizabeth Wiener
April 10, 2013
The District’s continuing effort to reduce the number of special needs students sent to private schools could yield big savings — $30 million projected for the next fiscal year alone. But, Mayor Vincent Gray said at a budget briefing Monday, that’s not the main point. “I never represented this to be about dollars,” said Gray, who worked as an advocate for the developmentally disabled for years before joining city government.
“The issue is that every child, to the extent possible, should have the opportunity to be educated in a public setting.” According to Gray’s latest budget proposal, city funds spent on “non-public tuition” would drop to $80 million — a stunning cut of $29.9 million, or 27.2 percent — from the $109.9 million allocated this year. That follows a fairly steady drop since Gray took office in 2011, with savings “invested” to modernize public and private school buildings, make them more accessible, and adapt more classrooms for those with special needs. Gray testified that in the year before he took office, the District spent some $168 million on nonpublic tuition, with funding “going north. We were at 20 percent, while the typical jurisdiction has only 3 to 5 percent in non-public placement. It was not financially prudent, or prudent for students with special needs.”
The mayor set a goal then of cutting non-public placements in half by 2014. Already the number is down from 2,200 to 1,300, he said. “Given the trend line, there’s no reason to think we won’t bring the number down further, with aggressive efforts to expand [capacity] for special ed” in public and charter schools. Gray said a new program of early intervention for children showing signs of developmental delay will prevent some of them from needing intensive services later. Some D.C. Council members sounded a note of caution, noting that Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi had flagged that budget item for monitoring to assure the savings are actually achieved. But Gandhi told the council the mayor’s track record is good, and expressed optimism that non-public placements will continue to fall. Others were concerned about avoiding negative consequences. Not every child can be accommodated in the public schools, said at-large Council member David Grosso.
“There are circumstances that require us to put some children in private placement. Parents in that situation are in a real tough spot.” No parent should think his or her child was moved to save money, Grosso told the mayor. “Make sure every child’s needs are met, and make sure the process is fair and open.” Gray, too, acknowledged that some children need to be in private placement, although he predicted the number could be reduced to 700 or 800 eventually. “As we modernize buildings, we’re making them accessible,” he said. “But that said, not every child can be educated in public schools. Some disabilities are so severe they need to be in private school, even in a residential program.” At-large member David Catania,a harsh critic of the mayor’s education plans, wondered why special ed busing costs have not declined as well, and are in fact budgeted at $88 million next year — more than the budget for tuition. Gray said the city is still responsible for transporting all children with special needs to school. “We transport to private schools, charter and public. Their transportation need doesn’t change.”
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