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Posts Tagged ‘education’

Worthy Needs, Worthy Gifts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 29, 2012| 2 Comments »

I’m fascinated by the many ways the Internet has enabled broader support for worthy causes. I’ve blogged about Kickstarter, for example, “a funding platform for creative projects.” Through Kickstarter, friends and other well-wishers can help fund a documentary, an art installation, or a book publication within a designated time frame. Magic can happen, often with only small donations that add up.

Today OFH_John tweeted about something similar for schools, Donors Choose. Donors Choose calls itself “an online charity connecting you to classrooms in need.” You can search for projects in your local area, projects that have special meaning to you, and projects that might let your company offer special expertise.

John’s company has optical expertise and jumped on a need at a District of Columbia school, where an applied science project on light called for optical gear. Read about that here.

If you are seeking to help impoverished schools in particular, you may look for the “high poverty” rating at Donors Choose. School needs of all sorts are listed here.

Photograph: DonorsChoose.org

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The Hare and the Pineapple

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on April 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Amusing validation for folks who think standardized testing has gone too far.

“A reading passage included [last] week in one of New York’s standardized English tests,” writes Anemona Hartocollis in the NY Times, “has become the talk of the eighth grade, with students walking around saying, ‘Pineapples don’t have sleeves,’ as if it were the code for admission to a secret society.

“The passage is a parody of the tortoise and the hare story, the Aesop’s fable that almost every child learns in elementary school. Only instead of a tortoise, the hare races a talking pineapple.”

Apparently, the test questions were so nonsensical, the kids are still scratching their heads. “And by Friday afternoon, the state education commissioner had decided that the questions would not count in students’ official scores.”

Have a chuckle here.

[We interrupt this broadcast for the baby to chew on my knuckle while his mother tries to get some stuff done,]

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A Last-Hope School Needs Time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 27, 2012| 2 Comments »

I was interested in an article in today’s NY Times about a school that gives chronically failing students another chance. It succeeds against all odds, but success is a slow process. New York’s mayor is not a fan, because many kids take six years to graduate.

Aniah McAllister, once a lost and wandering soul, has one of the happier stories. Reporter Michael Powell writes that she seems amazed to have earned 46 credits and to be headed to college.

“ ‘This school made realize,’ she says, ‘that I am much better than I thought I was.’

“That’s a pretty fair bottom line for any school,” writes Powell, “although in the up-is-down world of public education in New York, it might just be an epitaph for this small marvel of a high school. Known as a transfer high school, Bushwick Community admits only those teenagers who have failed elsewhere. Most students enter at age 17 or 18, and most have fewer than 10 credits.

“You can muck around quite a bit trying to find someone who has walked the school’s corridors, talked to its students and faculty, and come away unmoved. Most sound like Kathleen M. Cashin, a member of the State Board of Regents and a former superintendent. ‘They care for the neediest with love and rigor,’ she said. ‘They are a tribute to public education.’ ”

Read the article. I’m hoping it will have an influence on the policymakers and let an initiative that sounds so positive keep going.

Aniah McAllister, left, Justin Soto and Kassandra Barrientos attend Bushwick Community High School. Photograph: Kirsten Luce, NY Times

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DaddyLongLegs: The Play

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2012| 2 Comments »

Don’t you love “secret benefactor” stories? You remember, of course, that in Great Expectations Pip was convinced Miss Havisham was his secret benefactor. (Spoiler alert! she wasn’t.)

A similar theme is found in Frances Hodgson Burnett‘s A Little Princess, about a much-abused but uncomplaining orphan who one day trudges the weary steps to her bare-bones garret and discovers a magical world of comfort has been created for her.

In 1912, the American writer Jean Webster wrote an epistolary novel in the same vein, Daddy LongLegs. It’s about a poor girl in an orphanage whose little essays capture the attention of a man on the orphanage board. He doesn’t like girls and wants nothing to do with her other than to send her to college anonymously and see if she can be a success. He keeps tabs by reading letters he has required her to write every month.

Well, you can imagine …

The book was hugely popular in its day and has been made into all manner of anime and films, including one with Shirley Temple and one with Fred Astaire ( both of which have snippets on YouTube and seem to be in pure gag-me-with-a-spoon territory).

Last night we saw a musical version of Daddy LongLegs at the Merrimack Rep and liked it very much. Some might find it too epistolary for the stage or too sweet for 2012, but it wasn’t Shirley Temple and the audience was crazy for it.

John Caird, famous in part for the Royal Shakespeare Theater’s Nicholas Nickleby, wrote the book and directed. Paul Gordon wrote the music and lyrics. Megan McGinnis was the orphan, and Rob Hancock was the benefactor she assumed to be 83 and bald. (Spoiler alert! he isn’t.)

What was surprising was the strong feminist and socialist vibe, which the program notes explain were characteristic of the author. “Webster was actively involved in remedying the plight of the impoverished, not only from a financial standpoint, but from a cultural standpoint as well.” She believed that no matter what the poor had missed out on in their early years (we discussed that here), many could succeed if just given a chance.

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Why Children Need Theater

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 17, 2012| Leave a Comment »

A while back I watched the movie The Little Red Truck, a documentary by producer Pam Voth and director Rob Whitehair highlighting the work of the Missoula Children’s Theatre. It was a moving experience.

The Missoula (Montana) Children’s Theatre travels by truck from city to city all over America to put on productions with children in low-income urban and rural areas. The transformation of some of these children in the week it takes to produce a full-scale, one-hour musical is something to see, with many insecure children discovering talents that no one, including the children themselves, knew they had.

For kids who have never seen a play and have no place to rehearse — nor any props or costumes or sets other than what the theater company can pack into the truck —  putting on a production seems unimaginable.

As the movie unfolds, you see how doing the unimaginable builds self-confidence, and generates both laughter and ideas about possible futures. It’s not about growing up to be actors. It’s about seeing that there are options, and starting to think differently.

And in case anyone is more interested in the academic skills boosted through theater, this Education Week article makes that case. Not a bad case to be made, but it’s the magic of Queen Mab that speaks to me.

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Daily Life as a School

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 15, 2012| 10 Comments »

A reason that poor children are sometimes unprepared for school is that the words they are starting to read in books may not convey meaning to them. What does it mean to park a car if you have never ridden in a car?

The NY Times has a lovely article about one NYC school’s unusual field trips, designed to fill some gaps in knowledge that textbook writers take for granted.

Michael Winerip writes, “Experiences that are routine in middle-class homes are not for P.S. 142 children. When Dao Krings, a second-grade teacher, asked her students recently how many had never been inside a car, several, including Tyler Rodriguez, raised their hands. ‘I’ve been inside a bus,’ Tyler said. ‘Does that count?’

“When a new shipment of books arrives, Rhonda Levy, the principal, frets. Reading with comprehension assumes a shared prior knowledge, and cars are not the only gap at P.S. 142. Many of the children have never been to a zoo or to New Jersey. Some think the emergency room of New York Downtown Hospital is the doctor’s office. …

“Working with Renée Dinnerstein, an early childhood specialist, [Ms. Levy] has made real life experiences the center of academic lessons, in hopes of improving reading and math skills by broadening children’s frames of reference.

“The goal is to make learning more fun for younger children. … While many schools have removed stations for play from kindergarten, Ms. Levy has added them in first and second grades. [And] several times a month they take what are known as field trips to the sidewalk. In early February the second graders went around the block to study Muni-Meters and parking signs. They learned new vocabulary words, like ‘parking,’ ‘violations’ and ‘bureau.’ JenLee Zhong calculated that if Ms. Krings put 50 cents in the Muni-Meter and could park for 10 minutes, for 40 minutes she would have to put in $2. They discovered that a sign that says ‘No Standing Any Time’ is not intended for kids like them on the sidewalk.” Read more.

One thinks of all the small daily interactions one has with one’s own children and the learning occurring without forethought. There are interactions and learning in poor families, too, but if the words and concepts are not what they kids will encounter in school, I think these excursions can be very helpful.

Photograph: Librado Romero, NY Times

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In Central Falls, Kids Read

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 8, 2012| 2 Comments »

Central Falls, Rhode Island, may be best known today for going bankrupt and forcing its police and fire unions to accept cuts to pension benefits, but it has more going for it than angst.

It has people who care, like Mike Ritz and chocolatier Andrew Shotts, who are selling Chocolateville chocolate bars to help children at risk.

It also has a charter school that has quietly improved children’s reading skills, spreading its success to public schools in the city.

Joe Nocera writes in the NY Times that before starting The Learning Community in Central Falls, Meg O’Leary and Sarah Friedman “spent three years working with the Providence school system on a pilot program designed to come up with ways to ‘transform teaching practices and improve outcomes.’ ”

In 2007, when Frances Gallo became the Central Falls Schools superintendent, she began to investigate why families were so excited about getting into The Learning Community.

“The school drew from the same population as the public schools. It had the same relatively large class sizes. It did not screen out students with learning disabilities. Yet the percentage of students who read at or above their grade level was significantly higher than the public school students. When Gallo asked O’Leary and Friedman if they would apply their methods to the public schools, they jumped at it.

“ ‘At first it was, “Oh, here comes another initiative,” ‘ recalls Friedman. There were plenty of venting sessions at the beginning, along with both resentment and resistance. But The Learning Community invited the teachers to visit its classrooms, where the public school teachers saw the same thing Gallo had seen. And very quickly they also began to see results.”

Read about how they do it here.

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Tutoring Remotely

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 28, 2012| Leave a Comment »

People where I work have been volunteering in an inner-city school for years. It started with reading picture books to first graders and expanded to second grade reading, fourth grade math, and fifth grade “Book Club,” the one I do. I once taught fifth grade, and I would still read the books written for that age even if I weren’t volunteering in the school.

This past week, the NY Times had an interesting article on using technology to enable tutors to work with elementary school kids remotely.

“Edward’s tutor was not in the classroom. His school, a 20-minute walk from the nearest subway stop in a crime-plagued neighborhood, has long had trouble finding tutors willing to visit. ‘It is hard to get anyone to volunteer,’ said the school’s principal, Luis Torres, who sometimes cancels fire drills because of the gunfire he hears outside.

“Now, newly designed software for the tutoring of beginning readers has bridged the gap, allowing volunteers to meet students online from a distance. P.S. 55 is testing the program with students in its four first-grade classes.

“Edward’s tutor, Jenny Chan, was an hour away in Midtown, on a bustling trading floor at JPMorgan Chase, where she provides technology support. She was talking to Edward by phone and seeing the story he was reading with screen-sharing software on her desktop computer.

“JPMorgan Chase is sponsoring the remote tutoring program and encouraging its employees to get involved from their desks during the school day.” Read more.

There’s nothing like face-to-face contact, but if people can’t take work time for the commute, perhaps more people will tutor.

Photo: Librado Romero, NY Times

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Newspaper Delivery Man

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 15, 2012| 2 Comments »

We found a letter with a return envelope in a recent issue of our newspaper. The envelope wasn’t for a tip.

The newspaper delivery man was telling us, and his 629 other customers, a bit about himself and his work situation and asking how early we needed our papers.  He said that the delivery service for seven national and local papers was changing. Some some clients had always wanted their paper delivered before 5:30, but he was hoping people would let him know who could wait until 6:15. He told us he makes 7-1/2 cents per household. (I think there’s a song about 7-1/2 cents from the musical Pajama Game.) He referenced the cost of gasoline and car maintenance.

And then he told a story that is very common for generations of immigrants and Puerto Ricans (who are, of course, citizens but come to the mainland to provide a better life for their children).

“I am father to four children who are 11. 10, 6, and 4 … My wife and I decided to move to the Untied States 4 years ago finding a better quality of life for our family. I obtained my degree as a Licensed Electirician in Puerto Rico and my wife was a Nail Technician. When we arrived in the United States, we were faced with the hard reality that neither of our licenses were valid in the US. My wife and I decided to start our studies here, so that we can obtain once again our licenses and pursue a career in our field of study. Currently, in addition to my job as a Newspaper Delivery, I go to school every night — Monday through Thursday — and I have a second job, right after I finish newspaper delivery, as an electrician assistant, while my wife is both taking care of the children, and working as a Housekeeper at St Patrick Parish.

“Together, with hard work and dedication, we are able to cover all the expenses that come our way. We want to ensure that our children will learn by example to work hard to become self-sufficient and independent … . We hope God will provide us with good health and strength to be able to work each day so that our dreams can became a reality.”

Needless to say, I wrote him and said no hurry on the paper. My husband thought the letter really embodied what the season was about.

(I am always grateful for our comments. and if you tweet, consider following us @LunaStellaBlog1 on twitter.)

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International School Opens in New York

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2012| 2 Comments »

I had dinner with friends at Harvard Square’s Casablanca last night.

Hadn’t seen them in ages. Their older son is moving to New York City with his family this summer. A key attraction is an experimental “international” school opening in Chelsea in the fall. My friends’ granddaughter will start in the new middle school and their grandson in the new elementary school.

Avenues School is the brainchild of publishing whiz Chris Whittle, best known for his not-so-successful Edison Schools. He puts that experiment in a positive light on the Avenues website, saying that it helped to spark the charter school movement. My friends say that experienced and inventive educators from all over have rushed in to help with Whittle’s new global approach to education.

“Begin by thinking Avenues Beijing, Avenues London, Avenues São Paulo, Avenues Mumbai,” says the website. “Think of Avenues as one international school with 20 or more campuses. It will not be a collection of 20 different schools all pursuing different educational strategies, but rather one highly-integrated ‘learning community,’ connected and supported by a common vision, a shared curriculum, collective professional development of its faculty, the wonders of modern technology and a highly-talented headquarters team located here in New York City.”

Erik went to an international school in Wales, a United World College, and made lifelong friends from many nations. As Avenues plans to do, United World Colleges has campuses in different countries. The one in Wales is for high school, but other UWC schools are, like Avenues, preschool to 12th grade, even beyond. Kim Jong-Il’s grandson attends the one in Bosnia!

 

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Closing the Opportunity Divide

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 7, 2011| 2 Comments »

I went to a conference today on how industry and higher-education entities can collaborate better to prepare students for the jobs that companies want to fill. There was a big crowd, and among the speakers were U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy.

I was especially pleased to hear panel member Gerald Chertavian and catch up with what his nonprofit has accomplished in the past few years.

Starting in college, Chertavian volunteered as a Big Brother, and the experience had a profound effect on him. After he went to Harvard Business School, launched a company, and sold it, he decided to invest in helping motivated youths aged 18-24 who lacked the money, networks, or opportunity to get a good education or decent job.

So he founded Year Up. He built on his list of corporate contacts to make internships a key part of a training program that ended in jobs.

Interested young people had to have a high school diploma or GED and demonstrate through the application process (which involves getting references) that they are serious. They earn a stipend during a year of training in either financial-industry or tech skills. They learn workplace behavior and business communication. At the same time they get college credits at an affiliated school, which most students decide to put toward a degree after their year in the program. Companies have found the Year Up youths invaluable, and some are changing their HR requirements to allow in more people without a bachelor’s already in hand.

At the conference, Chertavian acknowledged that in spite of having helped 5,000 students over a decade through Year Up programs around the country, the organization was not big enough to achieve its ambition of a major impact on the opportunity divide. To scale up, he said, Year Up is partnering first with a college in Baltimore that will use the approach. It hopes to keep expanding the new model after Baltimore.

There are a lot of great You Tube videos that might interest you — some about the Year Up program, some about Chertavian, some about the students. Here is one.

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Waiting for Superman, cont’d

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 8, 2011|

Having blogged about the troubling documentary “Waiting for Superman” here, I thought you might be interested in hearing about a school district that has found one way to overcome a significant barrier to quality education.

The documentary’s critique of U.S. public education centers on the inadequacy of teacher evaluation and the near impossibility of firing bad teachers.

Montgomery County (MD) doesn’t have that problem. Can you guess why?

Deep, broad collaboration. Critical constituencies are in on the evaluation and the decisions about coaching and firing.

A June 5 NY Times story by Michael Winerip, “Helping Teachers Help Themselves,” explains.

“The Montgomery County Public Schools system here has a highly regarded program for evaluating teachers, providing them extra support if they are performing poorly and getting rid of those who do not improve. The program, Peer Assistance and Review — known as PAR — uses several hundred senior teachers to mentor both newcomers and struggling veterans. If the mentoring does not work, the PAR panel — made up of eight teachers and eight principals — can vote to fire the teacher. … In the 11 years since PAR began, the panels have voted to fire 200 teachers, and 300 more have left rather than go through the PAR process, said Jerry D. Weast, the superintendent of the Montgomery County system, which enrolls 145,000 students, one-third of them from low-income families. In the 10 years before PAR, he said, five teachers were fired. ‘It took three to five years to build the trust to get PAR in place,’ he explained.”  Read more here.

Having started out my work life as a teacher, I feel pretty strongly that teachers have been given a bad rap lately and that most are experienced, creative, and deeply dedicated (and overworked and underpaid). My daughter-in-law is also a teacher.

But there is no doubt that the bad apples are hard to fire and that every year that they get away with bad teaching turns thousands of children off the whole idea of education, to the lasting detriment of the nation. So I hope everyone will think about the PAR program described in the Times and how they might help influence school policy.

I will post comments sent to suzannesmom@lunaandstella.com.

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Waiting for Superman

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on May 30, 2011|

Last night we finally watched the DVD of “Waiting for Superman.” We had to wait until we were up for it. We knew it would be good, but painful to watch. It’s a documentary about the broken public education system in this country.

I see now why people come away from this movie saying, “It’s the unions.” But although we clearly need to find a way to dismiss bad teachers and reward good teachers, to just say, “It’s the unions,” seems too simple to me. Even if it is true, when you consider the context of poverty, unemployment, the highest rates of incarceration in the developed world, the War on Drugs, three other wars, confused approaches to immigration, Wall Street greed at the expense of the poor and middle class, antigovernment bias, and many skewed political priorities, to lay the problems of inequality in public education at any one door seems too simplistic.

Still, as the movie makes clear, we need to get rid of bad teachers immediately and make sure children get high-quality teachers before they give up hope. Lotteries to get into better schools are too cruel to too many. Activists can check out this site.

By the way, the film is very well done. We loved the creative graphics making the data real and the clips of Superman movies and past political speeches and TV shows.

Reader Asakiyune writes: “I very much agree with what you said about unions and teaching and the documentary–it bothers me when a problem as complex as that is reduced to one soundbite.”

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