FOCUS DC News Wire 7/16/13

 

 

As part of her excellent coverage of D.C. Council Education Committee Chairman David Catania’s attempts to micromanage DCPS and charter schools, the Washington Post’s Emma Brown includes this tidbit in her latest story: “We’ve put forward a serious proposal that I believe will help stabilize DCPS schools,” he said. “If you are not in support of what I propose, then what is your alternative?”

 

Well I have one, but it is not something Mr. Catania will want to hear. How about trying something novel like allowing DCPS and the charter schools to run themselves? Here is another suggestion. When it comes to cooperation between the two systems perhaps the stakeholders should have the opportunity to work out the details on their own? Managers work best when they are given autonomy and are held accountable for their decisions. This is the kind of respect the DCPS Chancellor deserves. The Mayor has hired an extremely competent leader in Kaya Henderson.

 

The tremendously positive academic results recognized on the 2013 CREDO Report for the City's charter schools result partly from the autonomy and accountability provided by the D.C. Public Charter School Board. It is dangerous for Mr. Catania to try and mess with what is objectively a great success.

 

The Council is finally taking their summer recess. I suggest that during this time the Education Chairman recalibrate his efforts at improving public education in the nation’s capital by listening to the leaders of the two systems and talking to parents. He can then ask questions of the Chancellor and PCSB Chairman to use his influence to move the schools in the right direction. Legislating change in this complex academic environment is the last thing we need at this point in time.

 

 

Technology in the classroom has made students better collaborators, but not necessarily better writers, a new study says. The survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that most teachers thought the use of technology — from tablet devices to Google Docs — encouraged collaboration among students in middle and high schools. But teachers were worried about students using informal language and improper citations in their writing. 

 

The use of shared blogs in classrooms led students to work together, teachers said. Forty percent of teachers said they made students write on classroom wikis or Web sites, while nearly 30 percent said they made students edit one another’s writing.

 

Some common complaints about technology — the use of abbreviated texting language and an inability to focus on longer pieces — were also brought up in the study. Nearly 70 percent of teachers thought digital tools made students more likely to “take shortcuts and put less effort into their writing,” according to the report. Students were rated poorly on their ability to “read and digest long or complicated texts.”

 

But that didn’t mean teachers were averse to using technology. In fact, half of all teachers in the study said digital tools made it easier to teach writing, according to the report. Eighteen percent thought technology made teaching more difficult, while 31 percent said it had no impact.

 

Conducted in 2012, the study surveyed more than 2,000 middle and high-school teachers across the country, mostly from public schools. The report found that the Internet’s vast maze of resources had mixed implications for writing.

 

On one hand, students’ ease of access to multiple sources raised concerns about intellectual property. A majority of teachers said they devoted class time to explain the concepts of fair use, copyright and citation. The challenge facing teachers was how to help students navigate the murky world of attribution, the report said.

 

“There tends to be a perception that students willfully copy and paste intellectual property out of laziness and disregard,” said Kristen Purcell, director of research at the center and lead author of the study. “But teachers emphasized to us that more often than not, it’s genuine lack of understanding.”

 

On the other hand, the plethora of online sources made teachers rate students highly on the ability to incorporate multiple viewpoints in their writing. In addition, the ease of self-publishing on the Internet — and reaching a potentially vast audience — made students concentrate on what they chose to write about, teachers said.

 

“When everything is shareable, students pay a lot more attention to the message they’re sharing,” said Joel Malley, an English teacher at Cheektowaga Central High School outside of Buffalo who participated in the survey.

 

The idea of their peers or people they don’t know reading their work made students more thoughtful, said Jennifer Woollven, a high school English teacher in Austin who also participated in the survey. Nearly 80 percent of teachers in the study said digital tools “encourage student creativity and personal expression.”

 

But teachers weren’t thrilled about students using casual writing in formal assignments. “It does take some work to get them out of ‘tech talk,’ ” Woollven said. “They’ve grown up in this world of shortening.” Both Malley and Woollven said their students often had trouble with capitalization. Purcell added that teachers promoted writing by hand when they wanted students to slow down and think about the process of writing.

 

Although Pew’s study examined the increased use of technology in the classroom, Purcell said it also highlighted a persistent digital divide. There still exists a stark difference in children’s access to technology at home — and teachers in the survey thought it was widening. “We heard consistently from the teachers of the lowest income schools that they have very different experiences using technology in the classroom,” she said.

 

Those teachers have to design their lessons to accommodate different skill levels because — unlike the commonly held perception — not all young people are ‘digital natives,’ the report said.

 

Malley, who teaches in a school where 43 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, agreed.

 

“I get kids in my district, some of whom live in McMansions and some that live in neighborhoods that border the city,” he said. “There is not equal access to digital tools.”

 

 

Children who attend preschool do better in kindergarten than those who stay at home with their parents or relatives, according to a national report. The federal data, which focused on children who entered kindergarten in 2010, showed that those who had some preschool experience the year before kindergarten at a child care center or a home-based program with a non-relative did better on math and reading assessments than the 15 percent who were cared for by a relative and the 21 percent who were at home with parents.

 

The kindergarten study was released Friday as part of a major annual federal report on the well-being of children and families. The longitudinal study will follow the kindergartners through fifth grade to see what kind of longer-term outcomes might be tied to things like different preschool experiences.

 

Kindergarten is the first exposure to formal schooling for many children, said Barbara Willer, the interim executive director of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, in a C-Spannterview about the findings. ”It helps determine the trajectory of success they will have later on,” she said.

 

The proportion of children who attend state-supported pre-kindergarten has been on the rise over the past decade, she pointed out, though numbers dipped last year.

 

Here are some other findings from the kindergarten study:

*Older kids did better. Kindergartners who were more than 6-years old in the fall of kindergarten had the highest average fall reading scores, and children who were less than 5-years old in the fall of kindergarten had the lowest average reading scores.

*Girls performed better in reading. Girls scored higher than boys on the reading assessments and on measures of learning readiness. There were no significant differences between girls and boys in math and science performance.

*Parental education plays a role. Kindergartners whose parents had not completed high school had the lowest fall reading scores and kindergartners whose parents had completed some graduate education had the highest fall reading scores.

*Achievement gaps already evident at the start of school. When broken down by race, white kindergartners had higher fall reading and math scores than black and Hispanic students. Asian kindergartners had higher fall reading and math scores than any other group.

 

 

The future of digital learning in classrooms will require more than just getting tablets in the hands of students to be successful. Education leaders and policymakers must focus on investing on infrastructure and professional training for teachers and administrators to grow technology in education. That was one of the major themes education technology experts, lobbyists and policy makers repeated at a Monday roundtable discussion, organized by Internet Innovation Alliance, and which focused on how private and public sectors can work together to improve digital learning in the nation’s classrooms.

 

Montgomery County schools Superintendent Joshua P. Starr was the keynote speaker at the event in downtown Washington. Starr said school leaders adapting to new technology should not just think about what devices and gadgets to buy. Educators must focus on physical classroom spaces, teacher training and curriculum design to ensure that learning decides what technology goes into classrooms and not the other way around.

 

“Learning isn’t being democratized, information is, and that is the huge shift in public education right now,” Starr said. By the start of the coming school year, every school in Montgomery County is expected to be fully outfitted with wireless access, Starr said.

 

Starr said the E-Rate program is one of the most important federal programs available to help schools improve Internet access and increase technology in schools. The E-Rate program was set up in 1997 and provides billions in federal funds to schools and libraries each year.

 

Officials from organizations such as the Committee for Education Funding and online learning giant Apollo Group, the parent company of University of Phoenix, were also at the event to hear Starr speak. Hilary Goldmann, senior director of government relations for the International Society for Technology in Education, said it is important for the country’s classrooms to quickly change and adapt to new technology. In the process, the teachers will transform from the “sage on the stage to the guide on the side.”

 

As the 17th largest school system in the country, which also sits in the backyard of the nation’s capital, hearing about Montgomery County’s work provides important, “real-life applications of technology for people thinking about policy,” said Jamal Simmons, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance. The alliance is a coalition of businesses and nonprofit organizations looking to expand broadband Internet access in America.

 

“Technology is really transferring power from big centralized institutions into the hands of individuals,” Simmons said. “Young people are really at the forefront of that. How do you democratize that power of learning? How can we make learning more interesting and more imaginative?”