Chicago Green Festival
Please join me on May 24 from 12-2pm for a presentation and book signing at the Chicago Green Festivals at navy Pier.
Check out the link http://www.greenfestivals.org/speaker-directory/chicago-2010/2178-cullerton-johnson/view-details/
Green Literacy: Seeds of Change
Faustus, anyone?
Here is 9 reasons that this will be a difficult decade for edumanitarian.
Here’s 9 reasons that this will be a great decade for edupreneurs.
- new money foundations focused on new school development
- a multiplying horde of venture/private equity investors interested in disruptive learning technology
- a small but growing number of impact funds investing for return and social impact
- mature engines of social entrepreneurship (TFA, NLNS, New Schools, CSGF)
- a generation of young people interested in edu (including lots of business school students) that can’t find jobs elsewhere
- a charter friendly administration and grant program (RttT) that dramatically increased the national charter opportunity
- the explosion of online learning, cheap access devices, nearly ubiquitous broadband, and powerful application development platforms creating potential for a new generation of virtual and blended schools
- a growing consumer learning space
- the press for learning in India and China which is creating opportunities there and innovations that will be imported into the US
Pinks slips? Teachers first.
As any teacher will tell you, the classroom are filled to the brin with students. We are overcrowded and at some schools, materials are scarce. Yet, why does it always fall ont he teacher’s head? Anytime a school wants to save money, it seems like the first thing to go is the teacher.
This week in the NYT, Jennifer Media, talked about the impact of New York schools and teacher cuts.
Possible New York Teacher Layoff Would Have a Big Impact
For more than three decades, New York City schools have soldiered on through turmoil, politics, recessions, budget crises and a changing cast of mayors and chancellors. But since 1976, the system has never carried out significant layoffs of teachers.
That may soon change. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said that if the city does not wring pay concessions from the teachers’ union and all of Gov. David A. Paterson’s proposed budget cuts are approved — a worst case — the city may have to get rid of 11,000 of its 79,000 teachers. Last year, about 3,800 were lost through attrition, mostly retirement, so if similar numbers are recorded this year, several thousand could receive pink slips.
Layoffs would hurt schools by increasing class sizes, which have already been inching up. They would also upset parents and students. And they would force the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, to retreat from some of his fundamental strategies, including giving principals the prerogative to hire any candidate they wish.
Layoffs could be carried out in a couple of ways, but in the end would be based on seniority and teacher specialty. The system could decide how many of each kind of position to eliminate; for example, 600 general elementary school teachers and 200 high school math teachers. More likely, it could allow each of the 1,500 principals to decide which individual jobs to cut, like a music teacher or a Spanish teacher.
In either case, according to the teachers’ contract, teachers whose jobs were eliminated would be able to “bump” less senior teachers at other schools whose jobs require the same type of license. So if 200 math positions were being cut, the city’s 200 most recently hired math teachers would lose their jobs and more senior teachers would move to replace them.
“Depending on the number of people you are talking about, the whole thing becomes very, very unstable,” Mr. Klein said on Thursday. “You might not just lose people to layoffs, what you see is a lot of motion and people moving to a lot of schools.”
Mr. Klein has long used the doomsday outlook to illustrate his opposition to seniority clauses in the teacher contract. In a speech last fall, Mr. Bloomberg said he planned to press Albany to pass legislation allowing for merit-based layoffs. Such changes are anathema to the union, and lawmakers have responded coolly. The last contract expired in October, and the new contract is headed for arbitration.
Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, said that Mr. Klein was playing politics and that it was far from clear that layoffs would be necessary. He said the union planned to propose a series of cost cuts, including a retirement incentive plan that he said would save the city as much as $300 million.
“How do you make that assumption? We’ve done all sorts of things to make things happen that nobody thought was possible,” on past budgets, Mr. Mulgrew said. He said that he and Mr. Klein should be working together to fight state cutbacks in aid.
In his budget speech on Thursday, the mayor said he would avoid layoffs by limiting teachers’ and principals’ raises for the next two years to 2 percent a year for the first $70,000 in salary, and nothing for any pay above that. The teachers’ union called the proposal unacceptable and is hoping for 4 percent annual raises applied to the whole salary, as other city unions have received in the last couple of years.
In speaking publicly about layoffs, Mr. Klein seemed to up the ante on the increasingly tense relationship between the city and the union. Mr. Klein said he planned to renew his case on how teachers should be laid off to the Legislature when he testified on the budget in Albany on Tuesday.
Mr. Klein said he planned to fight for a restoration of the $500 million cut proposed in the governor’s budget, but said that even if the cut was smaller, layoffs remained a significant possibility, partly because of continued increases in salaries and pensions, as well as energy and bus contracts. “People say can’t you make any other cuts,” he said. But, he said, “We’re going to have to make some personnel decisions because that is where the bulk of the money is.”
Putting New Standards Into Practice a Tough Job
Putting New Standards Into Practice a Tough Job
Challenges Loom on Curricular and Teaching Fronts
Todd Clark remembers his “aha” moment when Florida began rolling out the next generation of state academic-content standards to its teachers in 2007.
The updated math standards spelled out far fewer objectives than the ones they were designed to replace and were meant to encourage teachers to delve much more deeply into topics—a corrective to the “mile-wide, inch-deep” phenomenon seen in the existing state standards. But Clark, the state bureau chief for curriculum and instruction, says that one teacher’s comment at a hearing on the standards underscored for him the difficulty the state would face in aligning instructional practices to the new expectations.
“I had a 5th grade teacher come up to me and say, ‘Mr. Clark, I can cover all of these objectives by December,’ ” he recalls. “The way she saw it was that there was only enough material for her to cover half a year.”
Fresh Course, Swift Current
It is difficult enough for teachers in just one state to exchange long-held practices for newer ones. But if all 50 states were to adopt a set of common content standards, the calculus could become even more daunting: There are about 3.3 million public school teachers in the United States, and even if the initial standards were to cover only math and English/language arts, the numbers affected could be significant.
The potential challenge is leading some observers to argue that other stakeholders must be engaged in attempts to reshape teacher training, craft new curricular materials, devise methods of gauging student progress toward any new standards, and audit classrooms to ensure that instruction is aligned with them.
None of those conversations will be easy, they say. But without such efforts, a set of common standards will risk becoming the educational equivalent of bric-a-brac—attractive but useless.
“The danger is that once 20,000-foot common standards are out the door, that’s the end of the process,” says Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, a former director of the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. “If that happens, I think it will be a wasted effort.”
Like many other educators, Jennifer Morrison has been closely following the most recent common-standards undertaking, spearheaded by the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association, along with partners such as Achieve Inc., a Washington-based group that works with states to set more-rigorous content standards. Forty-eight states have joined in the initiative.
“The use of common standards is going to be determined by leadership, assessment, and professional development, and that’s where things are going to get political,” says Morrison, who was a classroom data and assessment specialist for 12 years. She now works as a consultant for ASCD, the Alexandria, Va.-based professional-development group formerly known as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
“Standards are just words. … Deep down, people know that, right now, it’s not the standards that are the drivers in the classroom,” she says.
‘Cherry-Picking’
—Illustration by Robbie Lawrence
As many educators concede, teachers tend to be creatures of habit. Learning how to teach to a new set of standards will, at first, be just one of hundreds of activities vying for attention on the typical teacher’s list, along with lunchroom monitoring and after-school coaching.
That results in what Morrison calls “cherry-picking”: Rather than beginning by breaking down new standards into curricular units, many teachers try to match their existing curricula to the new standards, operating on a mix of their own interest, what’s likely to appear on the state test, and what they’re habituated to doing.
A typical reading standard, for instance, requires students to gain new vocabulary from context cues. But Morrison says that the implementation of such a standard tends to be anything but common.
“In 17 different classrooms, you will get 17 different vocabulary programs. One teacher will use the textbook the district adopted, and another teacher will use the vocabulary unit she’s had for 30 years,” says Morrison. “Teachers are often on topic, but they are not targeting the standard.”
Observers say massive investment in professional training will be needed to move the needle in that area. But, notes Richard Long, the government-relations director of the Newark, Del.-based International Reading Association, no one knows precisely who will meet the funding challenge.
“Frankly, I’m hoping some of the foundations will step up,” he says.
As the primary stakeholders driving the development of common standards, states will likely be on the front lines.
Putting broad-based academic standards into day-to-day practice in the classroom can be a challenge for educators. To help bridge the divide, states have developed a variety of tools and resources that can help teachers better align their instruction to state standards and assessments. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia, for example, make assessment frameworks available in both English/language arts and math. Nearly 40 states provide curriculum guides for teachers in those subjects, with most also offering sample lesson plans.
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SOURCE: EPE Research Center, 2010
When Tennessee’s new math, reading, and language arts standards were unveiled in 2008, officials pulled out all the stops to try to reach every teacher, says Connie J. Smith, the assistant commissioner for the state’s division of teaching, learning, and accountability. Meetings to introduce the standards to every teacher in the state—in person and through satellite broadcasts—were supplemented with specialized content workshops hosted by expert subject-matter teachers.
That was crucial, Smith says, because the new mathematics standards introduced algebraic concepts at the middle school level.
Still, educators such as Morrison say that individual site-based professional development, embedded in schools, will be necessary to leverage changes in instruction.
“If teachers have to really focus on designing assessments that measure standards, they really see them in a whole new light,” Morrison says.
Model Curricula?
One crucial area is likely to be writing curricula that are aligned to common standards.
A recent paper by Whitehurst, now a scholar at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, reports that the effect sizes of certain curricula outpaced other types of interventions, including charter schools and changes to teacher-compensation structures.
One concern he has about standards is that they don’t always specify the content that students should be able to master at each grade level.
“Until that granularity is established, it will be hard to develop assessments and have professional development,” Whitehurst says.
To some extent, the United States’ decentralized way of dealing with curricula all but assures difficulties in reaching that outcome. The curriculum-development process is largely driven by state textbook-adoption processes, a system that critics say has caused the texts to expand as publishers try to match multiple sets of state standards.
In small states where few textbooks are aligned to standards, and in states that leave curricular decisions entirely to local educators, districts must use curricular “maps” to find and fill in the gaps between textbooks and standards, says Michael Lindstrom, the executive director of SciMathMN, a nonprofit organization based in St. Paul, Minn. And the pressure to rely on textbooks is higher in districts that lack the staff or other capacity to craft curricula in-house.
“They almost don’t have enough colleagues in some content areas with whom to talk this stuff through,” Lindstrom says.
In the view of Randi Weingarten, the president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, teachers need extra help with curriculum precisely because no one stakeholder group ultimately has responsibility for ensuring all teachers can access rich curricula.
She argues that the drafters of common standards should, in collaboration with teachers and other subject-matter experts, write model lessons aligned to the standards that are detailed enough to guide conversations about curricula.
“There has got to be substance and content that is illustrative, a road map aligned to the standards,” Weingarten says. “There’s a big difference between a content-rich, sequenced curriculum and, ‘It’s 2 p.m., open your textbooks to Page 25 and ask kids to read the first paragraph.’”
So far, the partners involved in the CCSSO-NGA common-standards venture have shied away from specifying content at a curricular grain size.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative’s college- and career-readiness standards in English/language arts contain examples of texts and related tasks that students meeting expectations should be able to master. But they are not meant to serve as any kind of curriculum, says Ilene Berman, a program director in the NGA’s education division.
“Ultimately, that’s a local decision, and we respect that,” she says.
Others believe that the federal government could play a role. Whitehurst suggests that the Education Department could be allowed to encourage other entities to design materials aligned to common standards, and provide incentives for states and localities to adopt such resources. That would presumably not run afoul of prohibitions against federally imposed curricula, as long as the agency did not mandate or endorse particular materials, he says.
Concerns Remain
Still, the fear that model lessons of any sort could slide into a de facto requirement remains real.
Kendra Parks, a high school history teacher in Madison, Wis., says even the idea of common courses, which are being discussed in her district, makes some teachers nervous. In her view, standards should remain more abstract, while allowing schools and teachers plenty of room to determine the content that should be taught in order to meet benchmarks.
“I don’t know if this is a wolf in sheep’s clothing or an idea that is just really hard to make practical,” Parks says about common standards. “I think [the framers of common standards] need to be clear about what success looks like across different curricula.”
There are widespread differences in what teachers actually do in classrooms, even in states that are more prescriptive about curriculum. Little national data offer insights into what goes on once teachers close their classroom doors.
A handful of tools developed over the past decade, though, point to some ways of providing better answers. One such tool, the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum, relies on teacher surveys to provide basic information to districts on the level of alignment within their schools between standards and instruction.
About 12,000 teachers a year, in districts across some 20 states, now use the tool, developed by the CCSSO and state partners. But Rolf K. Blank, the director of education indicators programs at the CCSSO, and a technical advisor for Quality Counts 2010, says he is not aware of any state that has audited curricula or instruction across the board. (Massachusetts, which performed its own form of curriculum auditing, stopped that practice recently.)
Instead, Blank says, it is more common for a district to request such an analysis from a state or for states to home in on districts with apparent instructional problems—such as those in which many schools repeatedly miss annual testing benchmarks.
Several experts argue that a form of auditing could be one way to measure whether standards actually bring changes to instruction.
E.D. Hirsch Jr., a professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia, criticizes most state standards for not spelling out in great detail the content students should be expected to master.
Hirsch believes that a common-standards effort still could produce better results for students if it is coupled with greater oversight of local curricula. He points to Finland, one of the top performers on international tests. In that nation, schools must spell out in great detail how their local curricula and instruction meet nationally set expectations.
“We pretend to give standards, but they don’t have any content or guidance,” Hirsch says. “The Finns pretend not to impose any content, but de facto what they get is commonality, because of their requirement for specificity.”
Morrison, the ASCD consultant, would like to see a more bottom-up system. For example, she says, groups of schools, and eventually whole districts, ultimately might devise common assignments and end-of-course tests. The schools could use the resulting data as an internal check on how well instruction aligns with standards.
Role of Assessments
In practice, the tool most states use to gauge outcomes is standardized testing.
But the predominantly multiple-choice assessments often don’t align with standards, in part because they aren’t well suited to measure higher-order critical-thinking skills, such as whether students can integrate information across several domains or apply knowledge.
As part of the federal economic-stimulus program’s Race to the Top Fund, the U.S. secretary of education has reserved $350 million to finance work by consortia of states to devise common assessment tools that better measure such skills.
Such consortia have proved viable. Four states have collaborated on exams for accountability purposes in the New England Common Assessment Program, and another consortium, as part of an endeavor with Achieve, produced a common test for Algebra 2.
In fact, some experts think that, although the development of new items to measure higher-order skills will be challenging, a potentially bigger question is how to agree on a common performance standard, or “cut score.”
“It is a political question about how much you need to know and be able to do to be proficient,” says Randy E. Bennett, a distinguished senior fellow at the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service. “But it seems to me to make more sense to have one cut point than 50.”
Experts also say that, at some point, states will need to address the problem of lag time between the creation of new standards and of aligned tests.
A hard-learned lesson under the No Child Left Behind law, state officials say, is that updating standards sometimes requires teachers to juggle new standards with the old ones on which not-yet-updated tests were based.
Still others don’t expect refinements in how students are taught until common assessments and the data systems that accompany them are well in place.
Unlike with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tests representative samples of students, such data could presumably be linked to individual students and teachers, allowing analysts to drill down into every student’s trajectory through school.
“What we’ll have is the same kind of haggling and arguing and noisy debates about curriculum offering more heat than light, until we have the data in place to show us what really works,” says Arthur E. Levine, a former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, who now heads the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
“We are talking about moving giant bureaucracies and whole states,” he says. “So this is a place to begin. The next step will involve improvements in the way we get to the standards.”
Girls and Science: Really?
Charter Schools: Another tool for Privatizing schools?
Interesting–another professor of Education brings up the issue of charter schools and privatizing education. What calls my attention is his historical background of charter schools. There may have been a start in the 1980s but charter schools have been around a lot longer. Maybe the question that begs to be asked is how do we hold charter school accountable since they receive more than 80 cents on the dollar to the public schools.
Take a look at the article in the AJC
By William G. Wraga
The original intent of charter schools, to increase the professional autonomy of teachers so they could explore innovative ways to educate children and youth, has given way to other agendas that have grafted onto the movement.
Increasingly, charter school policies have been influenced by market ideology that treats the movement as a vehicle for privatizing public schools.
Research reveals that, in practice, charter school “innovations” too often occur more on the management side than on the educational side of schooling.
And despite anecdotal reports of local successes, overall, charter school students perform no better, and frequently worse, than non-charter public school students.
To improve the education of all students, policymakers should focus not on the governance structures of schools, but on the improvement curriculum and instruction in classrooms.
The idea for charter schools emerged in the late 1980s as a way to enhance professional autonomy of teachers that would empower them to identify ways to educate students that were more effective than what the existing bureaucracy would allow.
Since that time, charter schools have enjoyed support from a wide range of interests, including teacher unions, minority rights advocates, and advocates of deregulation and free market reforms.
Over time, the agendas of these different interest groups have influenced charter school policy and practice.
Today, the rhetoric supporting charter schools usually emphasizes an offer of autonomy in return for accountability for educators and increased choice for parents.
Because the main idea behind charter schools is that exemption from cumbersome state regulations will free local educators to generate more effective ways to educate students, one might expect that local reports of charter school success would identify the regulations that previously had impeded school performance.
Armed with this information, policymakers could abolish those regulations so that all public schools would benefit.
Moreover, if cumbersome regulations are really the principal obstacle to school improvement, as the case for charter schools implies, then why not simply waive these cumbersome regulations for all public schools?
Not only would such a policy free all public schools to pursue innovative solutions to their educational problems, but also the time, energy and money spent on preparing tedious charter petitions, then negotiating the petition process could be invested directly in local school improvement.
Neither of these things are likely to happen because, despite the appealing rhetoric about autonomy and choice, another agenda has quietly come to reshape charter school policies: namely, to impose market-based reforms on the public school system in order to prepare it eventually for privatization.
Although the federal No Child Left Behind Act and the Georgia Charter School Act currently require all charter schools to be public, that is, funded by public money, both laws allow the public money to be paid to private for-profit companies to run charter schools.
This legislation has opened the door wider for privatization of public schools.
Research into charter school practice has found that “innovations” that charter schools typically implement have more to do with management and advertising than with curriculum and instruction.
Classroom practices in charter schools are little different than classroom practices in non-charter public schools.
The promise that the deregulated governance structures of charter schools would precipitate the introduction of new and more effective classroom practices remains unfulfilled.
When charter schools and other market-based reforms for public education were first proposed, there was no evidence that they would actually improve education.
Now that these reforms have been attempted, the evidence is still not in their favor.
Overall, the available evidence indicates that, nationally, charter schools do not outperform non-charter public schools in terms of improved academic achievement of students.
And international research has found that countries such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the United States that have implemented market-based school reforms, such as school choice and charter schools, have higher levels of educational inequality in terms of academic achievement of students.
Countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Japan that have strong publicly-supported school systems and few, if any, market-based educational experiments, enjoy high levels of both access to education and academic achievement.
If our goal is to improve education for all students, the bulk of the evidence suggests that market-based education reforms, including charter schools, are not going to help us achieve it.
The best policy for improving public schools is to invest directly in reforms that have been proven to work.
Those reforms should focus not on the business side of schools, but on implementing classroom practices that have been demonstrated to improve curriculum, instruction and assessment—and ultimately student learning.
William G. Wraga is a professor in the University of Georgia College of Education’s Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy.
Facebook another obsession in the classroom?
Obsession for new technology is nothing new to classrooms. From the Walkman to the ipod, the handhelds, video games and social network sites. everyone gets in the game and sooner or later the game gets them. New York Times recently posted an article by Katie Hafner about the obsessions over Facebook. Well written and engaging, many educators might want to consider her advise. Less is more. Here is the article.
“Facebook, the popular networking site, has 350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world.
Make that 9.9 billion and change. Recently, Halley Lamberson, 17, and Monica Reed, 16, juniors at San Francisco University High School, made a pact to help each other resist the lure of the login. Their status might as well now read, “I can’t be bothered.”
“We decided we spent way too much time obsessing over Facebook and it would be better if we took a break from it,” Halley said.
By mutual agreement, the two friends now allow themselves to log on to Facebook on the first Saturday of every month — and only on that day.
The two are among the many teenagers, especially girls, who are recognizing the huge distraction Facebook presents — the hours it consumes every day, to say nothing of the toll it takes during finals and college applications, according to parents, teachers and the students themselves.
Some teenagers, like Monica and Halley, form a support group to enforce their Facebook hiatus. Others deactivate their accounts. Still others ask someone they trust to change their password and keep control of it until they feel ready to have it back.
Facebook will not reveal how many users have deactivated service, but Kimberly Young, a psychologist who is the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa., said she had spoken with dozens of teenagers trying to break the Facebook habit.
“It’s like any other addiction,” Dr. Young said. “It’s hard to wean yourself.”
Dr. Young said she admired teenagers who came up with their own strategies for taking Facebook breaks in the absence of computer-addiction programs aimed at them.
“A lot of them are finding their own balance,” she said. “It’s like an eating disorder. You can’t eliminate food. You just have to make better choices about what you eat.” She added, “And what you do online.”
Michael Diamonti, head of school at San Francisco University High School, which Monica and Halley attend, said administrators were pondering what the school’s role should be, since students used Facebook mostly at home, although excessive use could affect their grades.
“It’s such uncharted territory,” Dr. Diamonti said. “I’m definitely in support of these kids recognizing that they need to exercise some control over their use of Facebook, that not only is it tremendously time consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling.”
In October, Facebook reached 54.7 percent of people in the United States ages 12 to 17, up from 28.3 percent in October last year, according to the Nielsen Company, the market research firm.
Many high school seniors, now in the thick of the college application process, are acutely aware of those hours spent clicking one link after another on the site.
Gaby Lee, 17, a senior at Head-Royce School in Oakland, Calif., had two weeks to complete her early decision application to Pomona College. Desperate, she deactivated her Facebook account.
The account still existed, but it looked to others as if it did not.
“No one could go on and write on my wall or look at my profile,” she said.
The habit did not die easily. Gaby said she would sit down at the computer and find that “my fingers would automatically go to Facebook.”
In her coming book, “Alone Together” (Basic Books, 2010), Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses teenagers who take breaks from Facebook.
For one 18-year-old boy completing a college application, Professor Turkle said, “Facebook wasn’t merely a distraction, but it was really confusing him about who he was,” and he opted to spend his senior year off the service. He was burned out, she said, trying to live up to his own descriptions of himself.
But Facebook does not make it easy to leave for long. Deactivating an account requires checking off one of six reasons — “I spend too much time using Facebook,” is one. “This is temporary. I’ll be back,” is another. And it is easy to reactivate an account by entering the old login and password.
For Walter Mischel, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, who studies self-control and willpower, “what’s fascinating about this is that it involves spontaneous strategies of self-control, of trying to exert willpower after getting sucked into a huge temptation.”
Professor Mischel performed a now-famous set of experiments at Stanford University in the late 1960s in which he tested young children’s ability to delay gratification when presented with what he called “hot” temptations, like marshmallows.
Some managed to stop themselves; others could not.
“Facebook is the marshmallow for these teenagers,” Professor Mischel said.
Rachel Simmons, an educator and the author of “The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence” (Penguin Press, 2009), said Facebook’s new live feed format had made the site particularly difficult to tear oneself away from.
“You’re getting a feed of everything everyone is doing and saying,” Ms. Simmons said. “You’re literally watching the social landscape on the screen, and if you’re obsessed with your position in that landscape, it’s very hard to look away.”
It is that addictive quality that makes having a partner who knows you well especially helpful. Monica said that when she was recently in bed sick for several days, she broke down and went on Facebook. And, of course, she felt guilty.
“At first I lied,” Monica said. “But we’re such good friends she could read my facial expression, so I ’fessed up.”
As punishment, the one who breaks the pact has to write something embarrassing on a near-stranger’s Facebook wall.
After several failed efforts at self-regulation, Neeka Salmasi, 15, a sophomore at Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Mich., finally asked her sister, Negin, 25, to change her Facebook password every Sunday night and give it back to her the following Friday night.
Neeka quickly saw an improvement in her grades.
Still better, she said, is that her mother no longer visits her room “every half an hour to see if I was on Facebook or doing homework.”
“It was really annoying,” she said.
Last year, Magellan Yadao, 18, a senior at Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago, went on a 40-day Facebook fast for Lent.
“In my years as a Catholic, I hadn’t really chosen something to give up that was very important to me,” Magellan said in an e-mail message. “Apparently, Facebook was just that.”
In his follow-up work, Professor Mischel said he found that some of the children who delayed gratification with the marshmallows turned out to be higher achievers as adults.
Halley said she and Monica expect their hiatus to continue at least through the rest of the school year. She added that they were enjoying a social life lived largely offline.
“Actually, I don’t think either one of us wants it to end,” she said.”
Illinois Education Laws on How to Expel Students
There is an extremely complicated issue of expelling a student from a charter school. The process is simple but the implications of expelling a student is forefront. Normally if a charter school will not expel a student fro two reasons (1) money and (2) data. Most charter schools do not want to admit they have a problem –if they do their charter may be revoked.
But as a teacher at a charter school and a parent of a child who went to a charter school, I believe the school administrators need to adhere to the spirit and the letter of the law if they want to grow as school communities.
Below is Illinois Law on expulsion. Read and enjoy.
(105 ILCS 5/10‑22.6) (from Ch. 122, par. 10‑22.6)
Sec. 10‑22.6. Suspension or expulsion of pupils; school searches.
(a) To expel pupils guilty of gross disobedience or misconduct, and no action shall lie against them for such expulsion. Expulsion shall take place only after the parents have been requested to appear at a meeting of the board, or with a hearing officer appointed by it, to discuss their child's behavior. Such request shall be made by registered or certified mail and shall state the time, place and purpose of the meeting. The board, or a hearing officer appointed by it, at such meeting shall state the reasons for dismissal and the date on which the expulsion is to become effective. If a hearing officer is appointed by the board he shall report to the board a written summary of the evidence heard at the meeting and the board may take such action thereon as it finds appropriate.
(b) To suspend or by regulation to authorize the superintendent of the district or the principal, assistant principal, or dean of students of any school to suspend pupils guilty of gross disobedience or misconduct, or to suspend pupils guilty of gross disobedience or misconduct on the school bus from riding the school bus, and no action shall lie against them for such suspension. The board may by regulation authorize the superintendent of the district or the principal, assistant principal, or dean of students of any school to suspend pupils guilty of such acts for a period not to exceed 10 school days. If a pupil is suspended due to gross disobedience or misconduct on a school bus, the board may suspend the pupil in excess of 10 school days for safety reasons. Any suspension shall be reported immediately to the parents or guardian of such pupil along with a full statement of the reasons for such suspension and a notice of their right to a review, a copy of which shall be given to the school board. Upon request of the parents or guardian the school board or a hearing officer appointed by it shall review such action of the superintendent or principal, assistant principal, or dean of students. At such review the parents or guardian of the pupil may appear and discuss the suspension with the board or its hearing officer. If a hearing officer is appointed by the board he shall report to the board a written summary of the evidence heard at the meeting. After its hearing or upon receipt of the written report of its hearing officer, the board may take such action as it finds appropriate.
(c) The Department of Human Services shall be invited to send a representative to consult with the board at such meeting whenever there is evidence that mental illness may be the cause for expulsion or suspension.
(d) The board may expel a student for a definite period of time not to exceed 2 calendar years, as determined on a case by case basis. A student who is determined to have brought one of the following objects to school, any school‑sponsored activity or event, or any activity or event that bears a reasonable relationship to school shall be expelled for a period of not less than one year:
(1) A firearm. For the purposes of this Section,
Ahh…Christmas Break
Soon. In less then 12 days, along withe the rest of the teachers in this Nation will be celebrating not just the arrival of a religious occasion, but a two week vacation. Two weeks! And when I ask other teachers what they will be doing– answers vary like the students we teach.
Ahh…vacationn. As for me, you can click the link and see what I’ll be doing for Christmas.
Faculty Room 