links 5-25-11

Chicago Public Schools Recess: District Offers Guidelines for Bringing It Back
Huff Post
But the city's schools are also skimping on the time for physical activity: a majority of grammar schools in the district don't offer recess.

Why Shop Class Is Still Relevent
Huff Post
Shop classes have all but disappeared from many American schools, and at first glance that might seem like a logical step. Why would today's wired kids need to know how to work with their hands?

Myopic school reform
The Times and Democrat
Subtle or overt racism is a factor in a student's decisions to leave school early. 7. Boring and less than challenging classes are steady fare in poor communities. Most instruction is taught at or below the mean level, resulting in school truancy. ...


American Democracy Beyond Casino Capitalism and the Torture State
truthout
(Gretchen Ertl/The New York Times) With all due respect to Charles Dickens, it appears to be the worst of times for public and higher education in America, if not democracy itself; public schools are increasingly viewed as a business and are prized

Are Parents to Blame for Their Kids' Academic Failures?Babble (blog) In Alaska, parents are fined for a child's truancy. A misdemeanor charge can be brought against parents in California is their child's truancy is seen as flagrant. And California also requires parents of gang members to attend parenting classes. ... Judge Orders Kids To Jail In Truancy Crackdown KPRC Houston By Stephen Dean NEW CANEY, Texas -- Day after day of skipping school ended with more than a dozen students being hauled to jail in a Montgomery County truancy crackdown, Local 2 Investigates reported Thursday. "She's in contempt," pronounced Judge ... No-fail policy comes into force in state Times of India A circular to this effect was issued by the directorate of education to schools in the state on Friday afternoon. The circular has been issued based on provisions of the Central government's Right of Child to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, ... Three Bad Bills Defeated Home School Legal Defense Association House Bill 215 was a driver's license bill that attempted to meddle with the education law of the state. It was nothing more than a back-door effort to increase the compulsory school attendance age. House Bill 247: This bill would have changed existing ... Scaling back zero-tolerance rules could help students, Asheville educators sayAsheville Citizen-Times The law also would allow suspensions for off-campus conduct only if it's expected to have a direct and immediate impact on school operation or safety. Suspensions for truancy and tardiness would be limited to no more than two days. ...

Related articles

• Public School in Switzerland (psychologytoday.com)

linkage 10-19-10

Green jobs and community colleges, a post by Ed Begley which discusses and links to the SEED program, a resource for community colleges for developing green jobs. The SEED site has free resources including webinars and links.

A Muslim woman homeschooling is interviewed and this article looks at Muslim homeschoolers 

How to Make Non-Readers by Alfie Kohn is a post up at the Daily Riff. A homeschool mom and I agreed about our two kids who had entered high school: they just do not read much once they go into school. The number of books read drops dramatically and this article zeroes in on this phenomenon.

Joanne Jacobs has a post about teaching English Students Need to Analyze, Not Just Respond.  Jacobs discusses high schools that cannot offer advanced preparation or close reading.  School-at-home families who want to do close reading and literary criticism in high school, see Nabokov, Lectures on Literature. 

Homeschooling Goes Mainstream radio show with guests Celeste Land, Director of Government Affairs for the Organization of Virginia Homeschoolers, and a member of the board of directors and Michael Donnelly, Staff Counsel, HSLDA.  The show covers a great variety of topics including virtual schools, Holt, and more.  

math stuff

A great post up by less helpful Dan Meyer with a neat GeoEye aerial image of Burning Man 

Art of Problem Solving has The Kitchen Table math book series out for working with younger kids and it looks very good, like their other texts, excellent preparation in problem-solving

Math by Hand offers lovely Waldorf-inspired math kits for grades 1-4

Ten Marks is a new entry into online math, free trial

Math Teachers at Play #30 is up now, a blog festival of posts, nicely organized

A Math Salon, more informal than a math circle, is shown in the charming video up at Math Mama Writes and she has a post about Math Without Words (shown in video)

Imaginary numbers are the topic on In Our Time: Melvyn Bragg and Guests Discuss the History of Ideas -- on the BBC

Godzilla knits a hexaflexagon at 360

Ko's Journey is an online story-based math program

Free math curricula for all grade levels from the Bristish Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching, Britain

TuxMath

As stated in the Page Count, I am counting pages of math texts, and the book 50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need to Know by Tony Crilly is more concise at less than 200 pp.  An even shorter summary is up here at Steven Coyler's blog.

linkage 10-7-10

A New Carnival of Homeschooling is up and running

Beyond the Sticker Price at NPR

The Prudent Bear has a post taking a cost/benefit look at a college education and does some analysis. 

The recession has exacerbated a trend that was already in place, reversing a development of the 1970s through the 1990s. In 1973, college was cheap compared to today, but the differential in average earnings between college graduates and high school graduates was also smaller than today. 

Interactive graphic shows the Swedish education system .  I guess with ed reform in the air we are going to start hearing about other countries and their school systems.  There's been lots of talk about Finland and I'll post some links soon.

More on colleges and the middle class  and The Huffington Post has a tacky new education page up. Homeschooling is increasingly included in online educational blogs.

linkage 9-27-10

This idea for a portable playground looks like one that many community learning centers could have their kids make and create.  Homeschooled kids often run businesses and participate meaningfully in their communities:  the only work allowed for kids within the compulsory education system is endless drudgery that is graded and tested daily.

Job Shadowing, Day 1 by an unschooler

Fun at Lexipedia using word graphs

Laura Grace Weldon on Waiting for Superman, Really?

Running out the costs/benefits of a college education: surprise! it has been falling as tuition rises (a longer post soon on this one)

And Greece undertakes reform of higher education.  There's a lot I don't know about Greece but if the word meritocracy always worries me.  I think society needs to make a structure where all talents are utilized --- this is actually essential to a sustainable future --- versus using literacy factories to winnow out people so the small supply of good jobs can be distributed in an organized way.

And the idea that education means the current school system only shows how entrenched is our linkage of education and schools.   Homeschooling, and now the inevitable home college -- or open source higher-level learning -- break this link in the modern mind between schools and education and return to the learner and learning.  From John Holt's 1972 (pre-Internet) essay "Beyond Schooling" in Freedom and Beyond:

"Another consequence of defining education as schooling is that as we put more and more of our educational resources into schools, we have less and less left over for those institutions that are truly open and educative and in which more and more people might learn for themselves."

linkage 9-21-10

Homeschooling Bites Back at the Daily Riff

And a good overview of the Khan Academy also at The Riff and another take on what's ahead for Khan who has recently caught the eye of Bill Gates

The CDC has a new study up,  Educating Teenagers About Sex in the United States 

Students bartering for classes in A School Without Money

She is still eating the lunches the kids eat and tracking her health

linkage 9-16-10

Voice of America has a post up about homeschooling with a bit of historical background

A retrospective of good work, Gathering Fifty Wise Homeschoolers in One Place,  in the Home Education Magazine is up at Laura Grace Weldon's blog

An LOR that did some damage winds up in a civil suit in Missouri

Alfie Kohn on What Passes for School Reform

Taking America to College: Non-Traditional College Students Speak Out is a post at ideas &action blog: "In these videos, students discuss what is getting in their way of finishing their degrees."

A look at Israeli and Palestinian schools  

Canada leads world in literacy (the article links literacy to schooling and focuses on one age group and higher ed attainment)

linkage 8-31-10

Homeless students now number over 1,000,000, up 41% over the last 2 years

Graduate debt-free, a look at paying for college

A mother recalls how her family worked for education policy changes to homeschool their children

The Ultimate Self-Education Reading List from Learn Free

Kaplan Crooks discussed

Homeschooling is the fastest growing form of education

Homeschooling becoming more "mainstream" 

A Zits comic making the rounds

The Kasemans on how homeschooling helps parents 


Living in two worlds: schooling and homeschooling

linkage 8-4-10

The title of this NPR piece is Looping Parents in on Armed Services Test; I have posted about the military in the schools after an SOA workshop here   

The history of homeschooling is the target of bloggers in a Carnival of Homeschooling held at The Common Room and an Unschooling Carnival is also up

The Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) supports controversial charter schools as well as a wide variety of other options including homeschooling

The academic-industrial complex is discussed in this article

An interview with homeschooling author David Alpert

The Nation has an education edition up with a variety of articles.  I'll post in response to some of these articles soon.

linkage 7-25-10

Rural, poor whites underrepresented in elite institutions 
         

Another homeschooler banned in Sweden reported on Learning Freely Network

Most popular free finds for high school level homeschoolers at Freely Learning

241 teachers fired in Washington: they got top performance reviews last year

An op-ed about stopping bullying  with a plea to turn schools into real communities, a difficult goal in light of the fact that children and families live under forced schooling laws.  Even the military is voluntary but not the schools.  And we need real communities in which schools provide helpful  services to citizens:  not schools that bully citizens and attempt to "play community" within themselves.  The anti-bullying policies of European nations are within the context of a radical fairness within the entire country.  The US has grown radically unequal and does not even believe in fairness or equality as a goal, only in the limp "equal opportunity"  which is not really sharing but saying everyone has an equal chance to fail or to steal. 

linkage 7-11-10

Examinations alienate students in China

She is eating public school lunches for a year and will have a doctor help monitor the effects

Surprise: more stratification of wealth within the educational system as reflected in spending on recreation

Almost 3000 students not allowed to graduate after failing alternate exit exam.  It seems incredible that the US cannot test meat for bacteria but can test children and young people  constantly and repeatedly for 12+ years. An e coli test is far simpler and more accurate than an exam to test the knowledge inside someone's head and to embarass and shame them with the results. 

Don't blame the dropouts, blame the outdated educational system is a viewpoint I entirely agree with though I advocate for far more systemic change, i.e., transitioning to voluntary community learning centers that provide services and resources to children and families which they access and use as they need (as opposed to students providing jobs by being processed through educational factories)

linkage 6-22-10

SAT Hurts Black Students' Test Scores   From the article:

There are varying types of intelligence. Some students, regardless of color, simply are not good test takers, and conversely because you are a good test taker doesn't mean you're a good student.

Since the SAT is a money-making enterprise, though, the College Board, even as a nonprofit entity, has an inherent interest in protecting it. In 2006, it reported assets of more than $464 million and paid the president of the organization more than $600,000. 

Spending on Sports vs Spending on Teaching was posted by Yglesias

Public education spending is a drain on family finances in Burma in this article.  The ever-increasing costs of so-called free public education are also an issue in the US. 

The Nation posts a list of how to help in the Gulf and also cites Tonic's excellent list 

Tonic also has an article on Games for Change Festival  where my son and I are going to try playing a few games.  The iCivics game, designed to increase civics awareness, and supported by Sandra Day O'Connor is free online.

Grades are boosted to help law school graduates in the job market. 

Harvard and Stanford, two of the top-ranked law schools, recently eliminated traditional grading altogether. Like Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, they now use a modified pass/fail system, reducing the pressure that law schools are notorious for. This new grading system also makes it harder for employers to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, which means more students can get a shot at a competitive interview.

Multi-grade classrooms and teaching are wanted but unsupported by the factory-line, age-segregated educational approach used around the world

linkage 6-18-10

Radical teacher leadership, a comic, at Cooperative Catalyst

A Jobs Mismatch discusses college-educated workers.  The article also refers to Plan B: Skip College in the NY Times. The idea that schools are job training centers is widespread but this has not always been the role of public schools in the US.

That a BA can now be required of many jobs that used to require only a high school degree is a form of inflation,  an idea I first encountered in The Future of Capitalism by Lester Thurow. 

Homeschooling in the Philippines and another article on the Phillipines also rethinking the 12-year cycle for schooling.  This last article is not unrelated to the above links where the extension of high school education to a BA, making it now 16 years of involuntary training. 

The ever-increasing length of schooling is a topic among homeschoolers and the 8th grade graduation exam in Kansas has been circulating for years now often as a specimen of the dumbing down effect.   The Smoky Valley Genealogical Society has this note about the exam on their site:

1895 8th Grade Exam
Salina, Kansas
Due to the continuous questions, emails, phone calls, and letters,
Smoky Valley Genealogical Society had decided to place a copy of
the 1895 8th Grade Exam on our website.  Our society DOES NOT
have the answers to the exam.  
 
Many people forget that Kansas is an agricultural state.  8th grade 
was as far as many children went in school at that time.  It was
unusual for children to attend either a high school or a normal
school because they were needed on the family farms.  The names
of the children who took the exam and their scores are on file in
the Saline County Courthouse.  Due to privacy concerns, SVGS
has chosen not to publish them.  Many descendants of those who
took the exam still live in the Saline County area.  The 
descendants of the school superintendent, J.W. Armstrong, were
the ones who gave us our copy of the exam.  
 
Times have changed, children have changed, and our world has
changed.  This test was not put on our website to create
controversy.  Rather it was put on because it gives us a glimpse
back in history at that time.  There are other exams in other
counties that have been published.  Our test seems to have created
more interest because it’s easily accessible via the internet. 

linkage June 12. 2010.

Formerly public universities at occasional links & commentary has a link that I couldn't use but a chart that makes the point that state funding has been considerably privatized since 1980.

A  list of 10 reasons why our current system design for public schools doesn't work is up at enjoy life unschooling

Lots of good stuff to read up lately at radio free school.  I liked Sal Khan at Gel 2010.  Khan's website is the popular Khan Academy.

Books in the home correlate with academic achievement in Science News 

The Significant Digit Law in Statistical Physics by Lijing Shao, Bo-Qiang Ma and discussion.
(via Infectious Greed)

linkage May 27, 2010

At Marxism and Education, many readings are online,  from early socialist writings until about the 1970s, including Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire 1970 (3 of 4 chapters available)

Study Hacks, a website that is Demystifying Sustainable Success for college students

A comic from a talented homeschooler Jason Holm (and his website)

MIT OpenCourseWare posted a popular new resource for Calculus.  Professor Gilbert Strang has an accessible class with a free calculus text, up at OCW.  These videos explain calculus for anyone needing/wanting to understand this subject.  

links 5-3-10

• Education Hell:  Rhetoric vs Reality, a diary at the Daily Kos on the work of Gerald W. Bracey, with a link to an obituary notice
• Radical unschoolers and the mainstream media, a discussion at Homeschool News and Muse 
• Comics from Home Spun Juggling blog
• Ongoing series of columns by Jay Strogatz on mathematics in the NY Times
• Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard, online at Laphams's Quarterly, Arts & Letters issue

• Free Minds, Free People conference this summer in Rhode Island 
• Rethinking Everything conference in Texas

links april 2 2010

A Brazilian couple receive a criminal conviction for homeschooling their children even though the kids were high achievers on conventional tests. It would be hard to believe for the vast majority of people throughout time, that working together as a family would be criminal in the 21st century.

Also at the Learning Freely blog, rare john Holt videos

Farm School discusses recess coaches and socialization in Child's Play.  Another take on the same theme, in Adbusters.

Homeschool Research Notes on the Learning Economy

Here is a typical article about colleges receiving many more applicants for admission and this college makes several public statements about their process. Associate provost David Whalen believes students with higher SAT/ACT scores are better people.  To get these better people, this college chose to advertise and support some not very good people on hate radio shows.  (Hate speech is often used by corporations for high ratings even though hate radio has a genocidal history in the 20th century -- our societies have had a price to pay for this new media and its unexpected psychological impact.)

President Obama signed legislation that would get students a better deal on loans.  It's hard to believe we need more debt in a crisis caused by too much debt.  Perhaps more free education.

links 8/25/09

An article from the Washington Post's educational columnist Jay Mathews on Three Smart Rules for Home School Regulation (they aren't). 

Interesting: the Dept. of Education has recommendations for continuing learning in a flu outbreak. PDF is here. Schools routinely limit the amount of time attendees can be home ill and in doing so, greatly contribute to antibiotic-resistent diseases.

Discussion of open source online education with hip title How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education and a commentary and expansion on the article Edupunks and Credit Hours: Fumbling Towards a Theory, this last touches on the credit hour measure and denigrates the autodidact:

The "edupunk," as near as I can tell, is the nifty-sounding update of the autodidact. And as with the autodidact, the edupunk is susceptible to some predictable shortfalls: uncorrected blind spots, lack of broader perspective, too-early path dependence.

Test prep entrepreneur Stanley Kaplan dies: an NYT portrait. Kaplan found his calling young as shown by the fact that his algebra teacher often let him teach the class (from article).