April 2008: Education Updates
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Political Landscape section is a collection of news items, updates, and essays on policy issues, state and federal legislation, academic standards, testing issues, the politics of funding, and other issues.
Teaching and Learning in
High Schools
At Wheaton High School in Wheaton, Maryland, 11th- and 12th-grade students can be seen giving careful consideration to an electronic blueprint of a four-story building that they are designing on their computer desktops. It might sound like ambitious fare for a high school class, but this civil engineering and architecture class is a part of the school’s Academy of Engineering. Wheaton High School is one of 2,200 schools in 49 states where classes like this one and others share an emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math education (referred to as STEM) and employ a national curriculum developed by Project Lead the Way, Inc. of Clifton Park, NY. Project Led the Way (PLTW) is a 10-year-old nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the number of American college students who study and eventually work in engineering fields. Last year 175,000 students were enrolled in PLTW classes nationwide. The 26 students at Wheaton High School who completed the Academy program in 2007 went on to study in mechanical, nuclear, electrical and other engineering fields and claimed more than $1.6 million in scholarships. It should be noted that 89 percent of Wheaton High School’s 1,325 students are of racial or ethnic minorities and 41 percent receive free or reduced price lunches. PLTW often places these engineering academies in high free and reduced price meal system areas. Even though the program is available at schools across the economic spectrum, a good number of schools with a PLTW program serve free or reduced-price lunches to more than 70 percent of their students. The program also effectively targets students who had previously not performed well academically but are successful in this program. Some success has been seen in attracting Hispanic and African-American students, but the number of female students attracted to these courses is still far too few. The PLTW classes are part of a rigorous 4-year program of honors-level math and science, plus engineering, leading to at least some precalculus or advanced science classes. The classes also include an intensive, hands-on collaborative engineering project. Establishing the program in a school is challenging and not inexpensive. It can easily cost $100,000 to add the program to a school, and there are additional expenses in additional computers and equipment needed for the program. Also, teachers need to attend, complete, and pass a 2-week summer training program at an expense of $2,000 per teacher. Those who have tried the program have seen positive results. Students have become more collaborative in the way they complete projects and help each other to learn. All of this effort is driven by the desire to increase the proficiency of American students in math and science fields as well as the industries that rely upon engineers and engineering-related education. To read more about Project Lead the Way, see “Engineering a Blueprint for Success,” Education Week, September 26, 2007, Vol. 27, No. 5, p. 26.
Teaching and Learning in Middle Schools
Another strategy aims at intervening in the lives of students when they are in middle school in order to prevent academic and social failure when they reach high school. At the Rogers-Herr Middle School in Durham, NC, teachers are making a concerted effort to pay attention to the developmental, family, and social issues that influence students as well as addressing the way these issues are reflected in students’ families. It has been noted that attendance rates, behavior, and grades can be even more accurate predictors of who will graduate or drop out than test scores, race, or socioeconomic factors. Middle school, these educators maintain, is the time and place to note these predictors and apply intense, systemic, intentional and personal attention to students who manifest these particular predictors in order to avert the problems that might await in high school.
By many indicators, middle schools are not doing so well. The poor performance of eighth graders on national assessment tests indicate that only 3 out of 10 students demonstrated proficiency in reading and mathematics. Students in middle school need to be monitored more closely for signs of poor academic performance and even more important any issues related to family, economics, peer dynamics, or other social factors that might come into play as far as the student’s performance is concerned. There is a need to create schools more responsive to the developmental needs of young adolescents that are often evidenced by poor academic performance, poor attendance, and discipline and behavior issues. To read more about these middle school efforts, please see “Motivating Students in the Middle Years,” Education Week, March 19, 2008, Vol. 27, No. 28, p. 22.
Assessment of Preschool Programs
At the preschool level, there is a need to design and develop a means of assessing programs and establishing criteria of accountability that work and are appropriate for young children. Since early childhood is a time of such rapid development, standardized tests are not an accurate and fitting measure of how well children are learning or how well children are being taught. If programs are examined only for how well children will perform, programs might be tempted to select students that perform well, letting more challenged students fall by the wayside. The desire is that states use assessment data to improve instruction rather than grade or classify individual students. In general, states need to develop early-learning standards that specify what children are expected to learn in the preschool years. States need to develop a method for rating programs and rewarding them for improvements in performance. Although states have tried to respond to policymakers’ demands to know whether tax money spent on preschool education is actually having an impact on improving children’s skills, it should be noted that lawmakers want programs to help children perform better, but do not always fund the very recommendations that educators say are necessary to improve student performance. For more on this topic, see “Task Force Offers Guidance on Assessment of Preschool Programs,” Education Week, September 26, 2007, Vol. 27, No. 5, p. 10.
