Entries for May 2009

Almost three quarters of aspiring elementary-school teachers in Massachusetts have failed a new math section of the state's licensing exam—the first time teaching candidates' knowledge of the subject has been assessed on a separate test. Administered in March, the new assessment—which includes questions on geometry, statistics, and probability—is the result of efforts to raise standards in a subject in which, until now, teachers were not necessarily required to excel.

Mitchell Chester, the state's commissioner of elementary and secondary education, says the new assessment makes Massachusetts the first state to approve a math-specific test for elementary licensure, as opposed to a multiple-subject exam yielding a single composite score, as is common in most states.

The swine flu virus that has infected people around the world has now been tied to the death of an assistant principal at a public school in New York City, the New York Times reports. The news has caused the city to shut down five additional schools, bringing the total number of schools closed there to 15 since the virus was first identified in April.

Mitchell Wiener, a 30-year veteran of the New York public school system, died of complications from swine flu on Sunday, five days after checking into a hospital and three days after his school, Intermediate 238 in Hollins, Queens, was closed down by health authorities. At least four other deaths in the United States have been linked to the swine flu virus.

Public-health officials are trying to keep New Yorkers, especially parents, from panicking. "Nothing we've seen so far suggests that it's more dangerous to someone who gets it than the flu that comes every year. We should not forget that the flu that comes every year kills about 1,000 New Yorkers," Thomas Frieden, the city's health commissioner, told the Times.

President Obama is planning to use a special $5 billion federal school turnaround program to prod local officials to reshape—and in some cases close and reopen—failing schools. The changes could consist of replacing teachers and principals or turning schools into charter school programs.

The goal is to take the nation's 5,000 lowest-performing schools—the bottom 5 percent—and transform 1,000 of them per year, over the next five years, into robust institutions of learning, Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently said. He was speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, a leading education think tank. Department of Education officials say that closing and reopening schools is not the purpose of the intervention, but it may be deemed necessary for some schools, especially "dropout factories" where 2 in 5 kids don't make it to graduation.

It might be the next school movement to sweep the country. Emboldened by charter school operators, parents of children attending failing schools in Los Angeles are signing petitions that could force the nation's second-largest school system to shut down those schools and reopen them as charters. Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school operator, is one of the forces behind the grass-roots campaign. It is being called the "Parent Revolution," the Los Angeles Times reports. (Barr's organization operates 10 charter schools, including Animo Leadership Charter High School in Inglewood, Calif., which U.S. News ranks among the 100 Best High Schools in the nation.)

Barr, who was dubbed "the Instigator" in a recent New Yorker profile, is known for employing headline-grabbing tactics to drive reform within the L.A. Unified School District. He is perhaps best known for engineering the controversial takeover of Locke High School, one of L.A.'s worst-performing schools. Barr was able to pressure the district into giving him control of the embattled school after collecting enough signatures from teachers there who said the change was necessary. It was the first time that the district ceded control of a public school to a private operator.

A coalition of education leaders, advocacy groups, and teachers unions is pushing for the development of nationalized common academic standards, an oft-debated tool of education that has yet to be truly implemented. This new groundswell of support for common standards—which would create a single framework of material and skills for students to master in all 50 states and the District of Columbia—is signaling that national standards might be moving closer to reality.

Witnesses testifying recently before the House Committee on Education and Labor said that common standards would better prepare all students to compete in a global economy. In his opening statement, the committee's chairman, George Miller, said the country's current policy—in which academic standards vary from state to state—leads to schools covering too many topics in each grade. In countries with higher-performing education systems, he said, standards require schools to cover fewer topics but to do so in greater depth. American schools, Miller said, end up with a curriculum that is "a mile wide and an inch deep."

Writing a winning college application essay is difficult. Thousands of high school seniors struggle with the stressful task each year. They know the essay is their chance to stand out and win over a skeptical admissions committee. They also know that a poorly written, bland essay can doom their chances of getting in. Choosing the right topic and striking the right tone are always the tricky parts. If only the adults in charge of these colleges and universities were a little more sympathetic. Now, actually, some of them might be.

The Wall Street Journal decided to "turn the tables" on 10 college presidents and see what happens when they each sit down to write their own college admissions essay. The newspaper asked them to answer an essay question from their own school's application. It set a few other simple rules. Each president had three weeks to write the essay. The essay couldn't be longer than 500 words. And no cheating or help from their university's staff.

A report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released this week shows that individuals who are more highly educated are also healthier, indicating that there might be more to good health than high-quality healthcare.

The report from the Commission to Build a Healthier America found that adults across the country who have not graduated from high school are more than 2½ times as likely as college graduates to say that they are not in very good health. Though the disparity exists in every state, the report finds, it is particularly clear in states like Mississippi, where nearly 75 percent of adults who had not completed high school reported being in poor health, compared with just 37 percent of college graduates.

Some might see the slump in the economy and the school budget shortfalls it has spawned as an opportunity to weed out the weakest teachers in our nation's schools. Indeed, the Los Angeles Unified School District is reconsidering the process it uses to fire ineffective teachers, with an eye toward making it easier to dismiss them.

For now, the teachers might be safe—in whatever way "safe" applies to the current recession. The proposal, which came up for a vote during a recent meeting of the L.A. Board of Education, failed to pass. However, a slim majority vote has created a task force to study the issue, those involved in the board proceedings say.