Reading is Fundamental

Another great program is in dire financial jeopardy due to federal budget cuts. Everyone needs to read today’s article in the Clarion Ledger about Reading is Fundamental, a federal program that is doing wonderful work in the state of Mississippi by putting books in the hands of under-privileged children. School and public libraries are good and all, but there is nothing that can compare to owning your own books. The Reading is Fundamental actually gives books to children and attempts to initiate an atmosphere of scholarship and curiosity within the child's home. When I was a child, I took it for granted that I lived in a home that made reading a priority. I was even a bit loathsome at Christmas when I would get books. But I eventually got to the point where that is what I would ASK for them.

I am continually amazed by the technological prowess of today’s five to ten year olds when it comes to playing a video game, surfing the internet, or sending a text message. However, when you ask them what they like to read, they draw a blank.

I urge you to visit RIF’s website. Be inspired. Donate a couple of dollars. Or at the very least consider giving a couple of books as Christmas presents----your nieces/nephews/grandchildren will thank you eventually; if not now, when they graduate from college.

Mentoring in Local Schools

I got that warm, fuzzy feeling in my heart when I read this article recently about Senator Tom Harkin (who happens to be the chair of the Senate HELP committee) and Jevon Carter, a 10-yr-old student that Sen. Harkin mentors at a local elementary school. I applaud Sen. Harkin for his dedication to education and his willingness to lead by example when it comes to education reform. I have a special place in my heart for mentors, right next to the teachers, because I know how difficult, yet rewarding, that it can be.

Mentoring is something I kind of fell into. I got involved with Project AIM (achievement involving mentoring) and the Starkville School District as part of a community service requirement for a leadership class I was taking in the spring of 2009. But I fell in love with the program and sort of stuck around. Project AIM’s director Cathy Curtis explains the program by saying,

“The crux of what we do is one-on-one mentoring that complements the student’s participation.” … “The mentors usually spend the first 30 to 40 minutes helping the student with homework, then they spend the rest of their time playing games, talking and just getting to know each other.”

Basically, Project Aim is an hour of your time each week that could make all the difference in the life of a struggling or under-appreciated local student. During my time with Project AIM, I’ve worked with two different girls at Armstrong Middle School. Every student in the program is unique and therefore has unique needs. My first student was loud, needed help with history and science, liked to play Connect 4, and loved to go bowling or to the movies. My second student was much more quiet, had trouble with grades but was determined to do better, liked to play history trivia games, and desperately needed someone to listen to her.

Mrs. Curtis can attest that many students in the program improve their grades or their disciplinary referral record after being involved in the mentoring program. Instead of focusing solely on academic achievement, or behavioral reform--- mentors have a unique ability to approach the student not as an authority figure but as a friend.

On a slightly related note, The Stennis Institute hosted a Bridges Out of Poverty seminar recently, and the keynote speaker addressed the importance of coupling relationships with personal achievement. You can’t just establish programs and tell people what to do if you want to help them get out of their depressed situation. You have to establish relationships with them to help them grow a positive network of individuals who can and want to help them. Although our keynote speaker was talking about poverty, I think this philosophy is directly applicable to struggling students, and I think this is why programs like Project AIM work. Senator Harkin doesn’t just tell Jevon that he has to get better grades in reading if he wants to go to college and make more money; Senator Harkin gives up a lunch date with a lobbyist to go to Jevon’s school to read with him.

After two years and two students with the Project AIM, I will admit that not every day was easy, but I was always left with the feeling that I had drawn more from the experience than they had. So this is my heartfelt plea to all of you who think your life is hard, to all of you who think you have no time, to all of you who complain about chemistry homework that keeps you awake at night---there is some student in this community who can show you how to be a better and more thankful version of yourself.

To those of you Starkville-ians that read the paper more religiously than I do, you know that Project AIM has been running a recent plug in the SDN. If you overlooked or dismissed it, I ask you to reconsider. Mrs. Curtis is in the process of recruiting mentors for the fall semester, and would love to talk to you about a commitment. Her number is 418-4021. Mentor training will begin the first week of August.

Gratitude to Old Teachers

When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake,
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?

Water that once could take no human weight-
We were students then-holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.

-Robert Bly

The Need for Unity in Education Policy

I’m not sure if anyone else does this, but when I watch the State of The Union address, I tend to stand up and clap when I hear something I like, even though I’m sitting alone in my apartment wearing my favorite pair of pajamas and drinking a glass of chocolate milk.

We saw something happen on the floor of the House two nights ago that we’ve never seen before: Republicans and Democrats sitting together, all wearing ribbons honoring Gabrielle Giffords and the victims of the Tuscon massacre. For me, this was a poignant and meaningful moment. President Obama said, “What comes of this moment will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow.” The full text of the SOTU can be found here.

As warm and fuzzy inside as this whole ploy was intended to make us feel, The bipartisan SOTU has garnered many critics. The Huffington Post reports that only 19% of Americans thought that the seating arrangement was a good idea.

I for one find it quite surprising that we would be so opposed to the idea of bipartisanship that it's very appearance disgusts us. Yes, it is all one great big facade, but why does this infuriate us so? My theory is that we don’t want to work together. We like partisan politics because it gives us a divisive discourse in which we can take part and at the same time supplies us with a “default” response determined by the national party. We don’t really have to think about it, we just have to disagree with the other guy wearing the other color tie. Incidentally, if I were to wear a tie, it would probably have purple sea-turtles on it, but that is beside the point.

In terms of partisan debate and battle lines, the issue of education has always been problematic, at least from my perspective. You can’t just say, Democrats believe in education and Republicans don’t or vice-versa, although both parties try to make that case when election year rolls around. Since we all believe in education (right?), the trick is figuring out how to provide it. Should we invest in charter schools? How should we pay teachers? Do competitive grants initiate positive reform? Are standardized tests the best gauge of student achievement? Should we support vouchers? Are school boards really the best way to govern? Here's my personal favorite---should we do away with the federal Department of Education entirely? (I don't think so Rand Paul......) Obviously, education policy is a divisive arena, but we all want the same end, it’s just the means which causes the dissension.

A large portion of the President’s speech focused on education, (Education Week has a good article here). Much like the tone of his entire speech, the President's remarks on the subject were largely innocuous. I don’t mean this in a negative way to suggest that his speech was flat or without purpose or passion. I mean that it was exactly what we needed to hear- the President trying to speak to everyone and not just one side of the chamber. When it comes to education, I don’t think we need to be partisans. We have to be able to say that enough is enough, and that all of our bickering isn’t going to change the fact that our children are lagging behind the international community, not to mention that here in Mississippi we would be happy to graduate some seniors that can read. I want to live in a country controlled not by national partisan politics but by conscience.

I have to admit, that one of the times when I stood up to applaud despite the privacy of my own home was when the President said during the SOTU that “Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done. We need to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.” Now, I don’t always agree with the President, but I can recognize when he is absolutely, 110% correct.

This upcoming year is going to be an interesting one for those of us who are captivated by the ins and outs of education policy. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) which is currently referred to as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is up for re-authorization. Many people don’t realize the distinction between the two bills, or even Race to the Top for that matter. All people want to focus on is how NCLB was a Bush-era fiasco and that RTTT is going to come in and correct everything. This is simply not true. Race to the Top is completely separate from and independent of the ESEA (currently called NCLB) because RTTT is a competitive grant program and the ESEA is a comprehensive funding bill for all states which has been in place since 1965. If we are going to finally get this education thing right, it needs to be in 2011, and it needs to be a concerted effort between American congressmen and women, not a brawl between Democrats and Republicans.

The following cartoon is purely for your amusement.

Paying Our Educators-- more controversial than you might think.

In today’s economy, every government agency is looking for innovative ways to shave a few bucks off of annual expenditures. Education is facing a particularly sharp razor is Mississippi were we can’t even adequately fund “adequate education” through MAEP. Many fear that budgetary shortfalls could translate into even more teacher layoffs in the K-12 community and inevitable tuition hikes for already struggling college students at public IHLs.

One new strategy for cutting costs that I’ve heard recently is practically infuriating. Economists are suggesting that we cut teacher pay incentives for procuring graduate degrees. Their argument is that higher degrees do not significantly contribute to overall teacher performance in the classroom, and pay increases for said degrees are therefore a superfluous expense. I can see how this would make sense to an economist sitting in a cubicle somewhere, far removed from the classroom and the reality that our schools are failing enough as it is without his two cents. But if he would just take a minute to listen to what he is suggesting, he would notice the hypocrisy of the idea. Cutting teacher pay raises for advanced degrees does not incentivize but actually discourages our educators from pursuing higher education.

The Department of Education and the White House do, however, seem to think that we should pay teachers based on their performance which they feel is most accurately gauged by student achievement on standardized tests. The DOE is handing out grants (even in Mississippi) to implement such programs. The program called New Direction, will implement merit-based pay structures in 8 Mississippi school districts. This all came about at exactly the same time that the Center for Performance Incentives out of Vanderbilt University released a report claiming that merit-based teacher pay systems made no significant difference in a controlled study and that there is “no evidence that being eligible for a bonus had a differential impact on teacher quality.”

While decision makers are on the right track with the idea of paying higher salaries for teachers, they aren’t quite there yet. Pay for performance would be like turning all the teachers into car dealers-- instead of scrambling for commissions, they would be scrambling for higher grades. If they really want to pay teachers more, they should pay every teacher more. My reasoning being that it just doesn’t make sense from a financial standpoint to become a teacher, especially in Mississippi. Sure, the retirement is good, but why would anyone in Mississippi want to settle for a $30,000 annual salary when the private business sector offers a plethora of other more lucrative career options. According to the NEA, the starting teacher salary in Mississippi is $30,090, with the average salary being $44,498. Teacher salaries are higher in Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida. We are literally losing our teachers across state lines.

Also, the educational system makes it difficult for students seeking a BA in a specific degree such as science or math or English to become a teacher. When I chose to become an English major, I was encouraged to do so by the department because they assured me that it would better for me to be specialized in the field in which I wanted to teach at the secondary level, which makes perfect sense. They also assured me that it would be easy for me to obtain my teaching certification. Well, easy is not exactly the way I would describe it, but it is doable. I just don’t understand why the state of Mississippi thinks an education major with a minor is English is more qualified than I am to teach 10^th grade literature. Give me a break. Part of the argument that economists and the DOE make in favor of cutting higher education pay raises is that most of the teachers who receive raises have a master's degree in education, rather than a specialized degree, but that is no excuse to cut the raises. If anything, we should require our high school teachers to seek master’s degrees in their specialized field and not just generalized education degrees. I was lucky enough to attend the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (a residential public high school), where a majority of my professors had Ph.Ds. You cannot convince me that their expertise did not make a difference in the classroom, and I remember lamenting the fact that every Mississippi high school graduate was not as fortunate as me.

During a conference hosted by the business school here at Mississippi state last year, the CEO of The NorthFace company was giving a presentation on leadership (or something like that). But he made a passing comment that has stuck with me to this day. He argued that we should include a federal tax exemption clause for all school teachers. As extreme as this may seem, it sounded like a pretty good idea to me because it would impress upon the world just how highly we regard the educators who got us where we are today. Sadly enough, we just don’t seem to value education, or our educators, and this is starting to surface in international test score comparisons. For me, all these economists’ theories are just the last straw. Cutting salary bonuses for highly educated teachers is like saying “Yes, we will settle for mediocrity.”

Recent ACT scores should be a call to ACTion.

I was struck with the realization the other day that I am getting old when my little baby brother called to ask for my assistance registering for the ACT. I suppose now that he towers above me at 6’2” and is old enough to start applying for college, I need to stop hugging the delusion that he is just going to be my baby brother forever.

The ACT is a big rite of passage. For any student wishing to go to college and get a decent job in today’s competitive economy, the ACT is the first major monster. For students, it seems the entire world regulated and determined by a long string of standardized tests. I myself have taken all of my MCTs, my SATPs, the SAT, the ACT (twice), now I find myself taking 4 different rounds of the PRAXIS and my handy little reminder to go register for the GRE stays in the top left hand corner of my planner. Just when you think you are done, you aren’t.

ACT just released a report on the 2010 test scores called the Condition of College and Career Readiness. It is odd, because even though national average score dipped ever so slightly from 21.1 to 21.0, the number of students who passed all four subject areas of the test rose from to 24%. Granted, the fact that it is on the rise is promising, but if you just take a minute to think about what that statistic means, it is really scary. Only 24% of test-takes met benchmarks on all four subject areas of the test. That means that 3 out of 4 students are going to need help in either English, reading, math, or science when they get to college. National English scores (typically the highest) dropped from 69% of test takers prepared for college curriculum to 66%.

So how does Mississippi match up with the rest of the country you might wonder? Only Ten percent of Mississippi ACT-takers meet benchmarks in all four subject areas. The average composite score is 18.8 and only 53% of MS test takes are prepared for college English curriculum. Asians and Pacific islanders outscore every other demographic in every single subject area on the ACT, even English.

The report also found that “under current conditions, students do not have a reasonable chance of becoming ready for college unless they take additional higher-level courses beyond the minimum core. And even when students take substantial numbers of additional courses, no more than 3/4ths of them are ready for first year college coursework. This suggests that the quality and intensity- in other words, the rigor- of the high school curriculum need to be improved.”

Basically, what we’re doing, is not enough. Labeling everything “Adequate” is not enough. Taking the minimum required coursework, is not enough. Apparently, the only way that the education system can work for kids who want to go to college is if those kids take the initiative to sign themselves up for advanced classes beyond the required “core.”

One Way to Avoid the Dreaded MCT2: HOME-SCHOOLING!

One of my relatives recently brought to my attention the fact that there are very few regulations in the state of Mississippi governing home-schooling. Basically, any parent who files a certificate of enrollment with the Department of Education by Sept 1^st can home-school their child. The parent does not have to have any sort of certification, there is no set curriculum, the student doesn’t have to meet any benchmarks, and the student is not subject to state testing. This all comes from the Mississippi Annotated Code 37-13-91. This scenario is not just true for Mississippi- 41 States do not require parents to meet any specific teacher qualifications, and only 24 states require some sort of testing or evaluation.

According to a contact in the Mississippi Department of Education, as of May 2010 there are currently 13,196 home-schoolers enrolled in the state of Mississippi. To put that into perspective for you, that is 4 times larger than the largest high school in the state. There are also 7 local homeschooling support groups in Mississippi that parents can join as well as an annual convention.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics in a 2007 report, there was a 74% relative increase in the number of home-schooled students from 1999 to 2007. Also, white students constitute 77% of the home-schooling population. The NCES found that the most common reasons given by parents for homeschooling their children included:

-a desire to provide religious/moral instruction (36%)

-dissatisfaction with social environment at school and/or safety concerns (21%)

-dissatisfaction with academic instruction (17%)

The support for home-schooling seems to have a pretty strong support and/or lobbying base. I’ve already pointed out how the majority of the states in the Union have pretty lax regulations in regard to home-schooling, and organizations like the Home School Legal Defense Association continue to fight to keep it that way. It doesn’t hurt that proponents of homeschooling have precedent on their side either. In 1972 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Wisconsin v. Yoder that an individual’s interests in the free exercise of religion under the First Amendment outweighed the State’s interests in compelling school attendance.

Needless to say, the freedom which home-schooling grants to parents is a popular topic among libertarians. Ron Paul even proposed a the Family Education Freedom Act (not that it got anywhere) last year in the House which would offer a $5,000 tax credit to families who choose to home-school their children. From my quick research into the price of home-schooling curriculum on the web, parents with multiple children almost need a tax credit. A 2006 estimate generated by Eduventures, a consulting and research firm, puts the home-schooling market at around $650 million a year and growing. The cost of home-schooling curriculum is literally all over the board. Parents can opt for free options such as K-12 Free Homeschool or something like K¹² where they could pay $1,138 plus the cost of materials for just three kindergarten subjects, with single high school courses in excess of $450 a piece. While perusing the web of different curriculum options, I was immediately overwhelmed by the shear number of different companies that offer home curriculum. I honestly have to give props to any parent who could successfully navigate through this inundation without ripping their hair out.

As much as I personally disagree with the notion of homeschooling, there is some statistical evidence that proves it works. In a 2009 report published by The Journal of College Admission, Micheal Cogan found that homeschooled students had higher composite scores on the ACT with higher subject area scores in every tested subject area except math than private, public, and catholic school children. But you also have to take into account the fact that homeschoolers only constitute 1.0% of undergraduate admissions (according to the same study).

My major contention with home-schooling continues to be that children are not given the opportunity, on a day-to-day basis, to develop the social skills necessary to function in a society which demands communication and interpersonal skills 24/7. I recognize that this is fairly universal contention among opponents of homeschooling. However, I have to admit that when I learned that homeschooling parents are not subject to any kind of accountability is very surprising, if not somewhat frightening given the number of students in Mississippi who are home-schooled.

Breathing a slight sigh of relief...

Today, the state of Mississippi released scores for the latest round of MCT2 tests. Scores across the state took a dip when the state changed the format from the MCT to the MCT2. But apparently things are looking up, according to the preliminary reports for 2010. There are more High Performing and Successful schools than the previous year and the number of Failing and At Risk of Failing Schools has dropped. This is great news but we are still not out of the water yet. Check out the press release and report from the MDE. While I was a little disappointed that the final accountability rankings will not be released officially until Sept 10, (for example, I cannot tell whether my home high school has moved up from At Risk of Failing) however, I am still glad to see that the state as a whole is looking better.