The government’s sluggish and bumbling response to Katrina shocked the world and turned FEMA into a national laughingstock. Follow-up investigations by Congress and the White House concluded that officials at the local, state and federal levels lacked a sense of urgency in preparing for catastrophic disasters.
This paragraph from a news story about Hurricane Gustav puts in a nutshell one of the most important principals of education:
If any learning is to take place, the teacher/parent must first have the child’s attention.
The way to get anyone’s attention, child or adult, is to have inescapable consequences for certain behaviors.
For example, the way things are now, many students reach the eighth grade without having mastered sixth grade literacy skills. These students are usually passed into the ninth grade simply because they have reached puberty. They have no place in the elementary school and it is right that they should move on. But not to the ninth grade.
If the consequence for not learning the current year’s material was to repeat the year’s work, more students might learn it the first time around.
If the consequence for not mastering the elementary school curriculum was to be moved to an intermediate grade between eighth and ninth until students could achieve mastery, our high schools might not graduate students in need of college remediation courses.
September 7th, 2008 | Category: Education | Leave a comment
If you haven’t heard about the Hickman controversy over the horse, here are the facts.
Harley Scott, age 76, has a horse named Peter Rabbit, age 32. They live in Hickman, Nebraska (population about 1,500). A bedroom community of commuters has grown up around the land on which the horse is kept and the city council has voted to evict Peter Rabbit. If he’s not out of the city limits by September 15, his owner faces a fine of $100 a day.
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September 4th, 2008 | Category: General | Leave a comment
One of my high school students once handed me his “homework” on a crumpled piece of notebook paper. It looked like something he’d pulled out of the trash. I wouldn’t accept it. He was incredulous.
“You ought to be glad I turned something in!”
I told him that I didn’t accept garbage from my students.
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August 31st, 2008 | Category: Education | Comments (1)
Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe is pushing to raise the numbers of the state’s college graduates. He’s willing to spend big bucks in the effort. Here are some of the suggestions on the table, along with the anticipated price tags.
•$1.5 million to make it easier for students with GEDs to get into college.
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August 25th, 2008 | Category: Education | Comments (2)
Pasadena-born Marc Yu, son of Chinese parents, is a musical prodigy. He was playing a Beethoven sonatina at the age of three and now, at the age of nine, he is going to London to play at the Proms with 26-year-old Lang Lang, an internationally acclaimed Chinese pianist who also began his career at the age of three.
What impresses me about the interview with Marc Yu that I heard on NPR is not his musical gift. Such genius is not the lot of every child. What impresses me is his command of the English language and Western culture. More »
July 19th, 2008 | Category: Education | Comments (3)
Two decisions by the Supreme Court caught my attention this week:1) Raping a child does not justify a sentence of death;2) Everyone has a constitutional right to carry a handgun.What does this have to do with education? Everything.The first decision reflects a total obliviousness to the effect of sexual abuse on children. More »
June 26th, 2008 | Category: General | Leave a comment
“Reading First,” the $1 billion dollar a year No Child Left Behind reading initiative, has failed in its intended purpose of improving reading skills among students from low-income families. More »
May 4th, 2008 | Category: Reading | Leave a comment
I’m in France at the moment and I continue to be amazed and embarrassed by the constant reminders that most Europeans can express themselves in more than one language while Americans as a group remain firmly monolingual.
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April 21st, 2008 | Category: Pre-school | Comments (1)
A large influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants in my part of the country is affecting the schools. It has had the positive effect of putting language on the front burner.
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April 10th, 2008 | Category: Pre-school | Comments (1)
A charter school set to open in New York City in 2009 is promising to pay teachers $125,000. Perhaps what’s even more amazing is that the principal will earn less than the classroom teachers, a mere $90,000 to their six-figure salaries. According to the news story in which I read this information,
the new school will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Is significantly higher pay for teachers the key to improving schools? More »
April 4th, 2008 | Category: Education | Comments (5)
