Children are struggling at school because they don’t know if they are left or right-handed

The proportion of infants arriving at school not knowing whether they are right or left-handed has trebled in the past decade, researchers say. The situation has been made worse by excessive parental fears, driven by cot death, about letting them lie or crawl on their front.

“The most important thing parents can do is ensure that when they are being observed during the day, they are given a chance to be on their front.” Previous research by Portwood has found that 57% of three-year-olds are unable to carry out tasks expected at their age. She cited children’s inactive lifestyles as “a major contributory factor”.

Other experts have also raised concerns about children’s development. “Brain development is at its most rapid between the age of zero and three,” said Aric Sigman, a psychologist and a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. He pointed to research showing that for every hour a day a three-year-old watches television, there is a 9% rise in attention problems.

Sigman has described television as “the greatest unacknowledged public health issue of our time”. He also believes video games have led to children spending less time working with their hands and failing to grasp concepts such as weight, volume and measurement.

“By using your hands, you can actually become more civilised,” said Sigman. “These are problems likely to persist in life, they are rather indelible.”

The problem was highlighted at the Conservative party conference when a restaurateur told a session addressed by David Willetts, the shadow skills secretary, that she was unable to find British employees under 25 who had the dexterity to peel a potato.

Source: Times Online, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article5114484.ece

And here’s the proof: Use the JUMP program and enjoy the unaccustomed taste of success

Melissa Marsh is a special education co-ordinator at Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw School in Port Hardy, at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Its students include some of the most challenged kids in Canada. Many struggle with learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities and behaviour problems. The community has its share of social issues, and parental involvement is low.

For kids like these, academic failure is depressingly familiar. “The shutdown mode comes extremely quickly,” Ms. Marsh says. But now, kids at this school are experiencing the unaccustomed taste of success in a subject that far more advantaged kids have grown to dread - math.

The JUMP program, pioneered by Toronto mathematician John Mighton, breaks almost every rule of current math pedagogy. It does not depend on the “discovery” method, group work or real-life examples. It is highly structured, relies on a great deal of direct instruction, repetition and reinforcement, and proceeds in small, incremental steps.

It also works.

“Repetition is crucial for many of our students,” says Wayne Peterson, the principal. He adds, “Your regular math texts have too much reading.” JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies) is structured so that every kid can solve the problems, one small step at a time. That builds their confidence and self-esteem, and keeps them motivated and engaged. It can get even low achievers excited about math. Teachers say their math skills dramatically improve - and so does their behaviour, their levels of engagement and their attitude.

“The kids aren’t fighting me tooth and nail any more,” says Ms. Marsh. “They know what’s expected. They have the steps set out in front of them and they know they are going to be able to achieve all of those steps. The kids in my special education class go, ‘Whoo-hoo! I did the bonus question and I got it right!’ One Grade 7 student has never been able to sit in math class without completely disrupting it. JUMP has changed that. Today, he participates in class discussion and does the written work by himself.”

The JUMP program is now being used in more than a dozen first nations schools in B.C., as well as in many regular schools in the Vancouver area. “We found that the regular textbook way wasn’t reaching all the kids,” says Christine Hammond, head teacher of N’Kwala School, near Merit. The program is especially effective with her ESL students, because they don’t have to wade through oceans of text. One floundering Innu boy, for example, quickly became a math whiz. The kids at her small band school are now performing at the regional average in math, she says. JUMP is also effective with adult learners, some of whom, after a lifetime of frustration, are getting their GEDs.

Liz Barrett is a South Africa-born educator who travels the province doing outreach and teacher support in first nations schools. For her, proficiency in math is a social justice issue. “These kids are falling by the wayside, and that’s unacceptable. If your students aren’t getting a Grade 12, the door is closed to them.” She discovered the JUMP program four years ago, when she heard Mr. Mighton lecture in B.C., and became a passionate advocate. She’s now helping to launch a JUMP pilot program in South Africa.

Mr. Mighton, 52, is an unusual man. As well as being a mathematician (currently in residence at Toronto’s Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences), he is one of Canada’s best playwrights. He got interested in math education because he thinks the state of numeracy in Canada is a disaster. Judging by the evidence, he’s right. In Ontario, for example, a third of community college students are in danger of failing first-year math. Mr. Mighton also believes we must reverse the “culture of failure” that permeates math education. “There’s no reason the vast majority of kids can’t learn math.”

Ten years ago, Mr. Mighton began tutoring inner-city Toronto kids in his apartment, with great success. The next task was to determine whether JUMP would scale up. He began working to persuade school boards, a far tougher task than he expected. But the initial results have been good. One British inner-city school district, in London, agreed to try it. At the start, the kids were performing an average of two years below the national level in math. After one year of JUMP, 60 per cent of them passed the national exams.

JUMP works for middle-class kids, too. One Toronto teacher used it with her Grade 5 kids, whose math skills at the start of the year ranged from Grade 3 to Grade 7. By the end of the year, every student signed up for the Pythagoras competition, which is written only by top students. Fifteen out of the 17 achieved distinction.

The JUMP program is founded on observation, evidence, teacher feedback, continuous improvement and rigour, combined with new research findings on how the brain learns. By contrast, most programs taught in school are not. For the past couple of decades, both math and reading instruction have been an ideological battlefield that pits the “progressives” - educators who favour good things such as discovery and creativity - against the traditionalists, who favour bad things such as repetition and direct instruction. The progressives have had the upper hand, which is one reason why JUMP has been regarded in some quarters - especially in progressive-minded Ontario - as positively dangerous. Last May, consultants with the Toronto District School Board dismissed JUMP as a form of “rote, procedural learning.” In Ontario, that’s the kiss of death.

Now the tide is turning, though not fast enough. Last spring, the U.S. National Mathematics Advisory Panel endorsed the seemingly obvious idea that, in order to succeed in math, children need to understand what they’re doing.

But the school system is plagued by other barriers that actively discourage best practices. One is the widespread use of consultants, who often write the very textbooks they then are paid to recommend. Some teachers are heavily discouraged from using instructional methods or materials their school board frowns on, even though they work. Many schools and parents are beaten into submission by claims that certain programs are “evidence-based” even though they’re not. There’s a lot at stake in how curriculum decisions are made - but parents and teachers seldom have a clue, or a voice.

So if you’re interested in JUMP for your kid, you may have to move to Vancouver or Port Hardy. You could also check out the JUMP website (jumpmath.org). And Mr. Mighton has written two books, The Myth of Ability and The End of Ignorance. The program survives on charitable support, and he is a more or less full-time volunteer.

“Teachers get so excited by this,” says Liz Barrett. “Suddenly they’ve got the tools to reach the students, and suddenly they’re all achieving.”

Source: Globe and Mail, Canada
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081108.COWENT08/TPStory/National

Conventional wisdom says low-income parents whose children attend low-performing public schools do not care much about their children’s education and, therefore, are not involved in their children’s schools and their children’s learning away from school.

Now, a new report, “One Dream, Two Realities,” commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, turns conventional wisdom on its head. The report shows that instead of not caring, such parents are the most likely to see rigorous education and their own involvement as being essential to their children’s success.

The researchers argue that society needs to stop blaming parents when students in low-performing schools do not succeed and start considering how schools are failing both their charges and the parents.

To reach their conclusions, researchers conducted focus groups and a nationally representative survey of 1,006 parents of current and recent high school students in urban, suburban and rural towns and cities across the nation. Parents verified whether their children attend or attended high-performing schools, moderate-performing schools or low-performing schools, the major criterion being the proportion of students from those high schools who go on to college.

The report confirms what educators and scholars have known: Parents are the key to the educational success of their children.

One of the report’s critical findings is that most of the nation’s approximately 25-million parents with children in high schools want to be more involved but are frustrated when schools do not give them adequate information or opportunities to participate more effectively.

Not surprisingly, the report shows that 83 percent of parents with students in high-performing schools said their school was doing a very or fairly good job communicating with them about their child’s academic performance, compared to only 43 percent of parents with students in low-performing schools. Seventy percent of parents whose children attend high-performing schools say the school does a good job informing parents of the requirements for graduation and college admission, compared with only 38 percent of parents of students in low-performing schools.

Another key finding, again bucking conventional wisdom, is that most minority parents want their children to attend college. In fact, 92 percent of black parents and 90 percent of Hispanic parents consider going to college to be “very important,” compared to 78 percent of white parents.

As more students join the ranks of the estimated 1.2-million who do not graduate annually, educators are trying to find ways to get more parents involved. Among the report’s suggestions based on what parents said they want:

• Flexible parent-teacher conferences that consider the schedules of parents who work;

• Immediate notification when their children have academic problems, cut classes or skip school;

• Homework hot lines to assist both children and parents;

• More information about graduation requirements and college admissions;

• Conferences in eighth or ninth grade to discuss what it will take for their children to succeed in high school;

• One faculty adviser who tracks their student all the way through high school as a mentor and a personal point of contact;

• Incorporate homework assignments that involve families in every course.

The report concludes that “America itself has two school systems — one that is largely equipping children for the demands of high school, college and the workplace and another that is too often failing them; one that is effectively engaging parents in the education of their children and another that is failing to do so. … Schools and parents have clear pathways to begin to improve one element that we know has dramatic impact on the education of children — the sustained engagement of parents who play vital roles in educating their children and nurturing them into the future.”

“One Dream, Two Realities” may have flaws, but in light of the urgency it brings to the issue of parental involvement, those flaws can be forgiven. It correctly points out that the current state of our public school system is “inconsistent with America’s promise of equal opportunity.”

Source: Tampabay.com, FL
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/article884627.ece

Is our generation too heavily dependent on the Internet? According to a recent Wi-Fi Alliance and Wakefield Research survey, almost three out of five students would not go to a college that does not offer free wi-fi. In fact, “nine out of 10 college students in the United States say wi-fi access is as essential to education as classrooms and computers,” says the study.

Some scientists and writers suggest that spending a great deal of time on the Internet can significantly shorten a person’s attention span. The same survey states, “More than half [of the students surveyed] have checked Facebook or MySpace and sent or received e-mail while using their laptop in class.” I have seen, in my lecture classes, no shortage of high-achieving and academically motivated Brandeis students surreptitiously checking Facebook instead of taking notes. The temptation is strong. Is the Internet so addictive it prevents even the best students from concentrating in class?

The Atlantic Monthly recently published a popular article by Nicholas Carr titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Internet allows us a vast range of instantly accessible information; research used to entail hours spent in libraries poring over books, articles, newspaper archives and so on. Now we can click-click-click our way through the Internet, jumping from Web page to Web page, skimming through information from one hyperlink to another. In the article, Carr describes the effect years of doing so has had on his way of thinking: “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

People who are used to reading on the Internet might find it difficult to concentrate on the linear narrative of a book. A New York Times article states: “Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers.” Despite all the obvious advantages of having so much information at our fingertips, it is possible that the format in which it’s presented erodes our reading skills.

In general, it seems to me that spending so much time in the virtual world is slowly turning us into zombies. We are increasingly disconnected from real life. We spend less time outdoors or engaging in physical activity. We are so immersed in our technology we end up limiting our interactions with other people. Talking to friends on Facebook is not the same as talking to them in person. Talking to friends you’ve “met” on the Internet but not in real life doesn’t count at all. The more that technology advances, it seems, the more isolated we become; take the example of Netflix. Even the drive to the video store and the basic interaction with the guy behind the counter is no longer a necessary part of the process of renting movies. We can get them mailed to us directly, so we don’t even need to leave the house and make that tiny effort.

We seriously need to reevaluate our priorities. Do we really need wi-fi so desperately that we’re willing to cross colleges off our lists just because they don’t offer it in restaurants, classrooms, parks, coffee shops, even in our cars? Large percentages of students, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance, use the Internet in all these places.

Despite all its advantages, the Internet, when used so excessively, seems to impair our social skills and numb our brains. The survey even found that “If forced to choose, nearly half of respondents (48 percent) would give up beer before giving up Wi-fi.” For college students, that seems extreme.

Source: Justice, MA
http://tinyurl.com/5jcevc

Dear Dr. Fournier: I just came from a school council meeting where parents were furious because of low achievement test scores. These are the same people that put stickers on their cars saying their child is an A student. How can you love your child’s school one day and hate it the next? When they give our children good grades, they’re great, but when they flunk standardized tests, our schools are bad?

Grades and achievement tests are both important. A law school student might have graduated with top honors and even been the editor of his school’s law review but will not be able to practice law until he passes the state bar exam. The challenge lies in the fact that children must do well from day to day in the classroom yet they must be able to pass tests made by others from outside your child’s school in order to be deemed a success.

Neither of these accomplishments guarantees your child success as an adult because school systems and standardized test makers are operating on the 1940s structure of education in this country, which was designed for the industrial era.

Your children must learn skills that are not being taught in schools.

WHAT TO DO

Harper’s magazine reports in the article “Figuratively Speaking” by John MacIntyre that 77 percent of parents of school-aged youth say they are satisfied with their children’s education. If this many people are happy, why do politicians and international studies indicate that our schools are so far below world standards? Obviously not everyone is happy. The same report says that the number decreases when adults in this country are asked the same question.

Only 44 percent of this group is all right with primary and secondary education. That means 56 percent does not believe our school systems are producing well-educated young adults. Of course these are many of the people that are supposed to employ our kids when they are older, so we have to admit that their opinion counts.

Strong American Schools chaired by former Colorado Governor Roy Romer found in 2004 that 33 percent of this country’s high school graduates needed remedial courses in college. Even though they had the grades to get into college and may have passed the SAT or ACT, they did not have the elementary/high school skills to do college work!

Furthermore, 29 percent of all students in four-year colleges and 43 percent of those in junior colleges needed remedial courses. Every one of those remedial students took courses in high school, passed those courses but learned close to nothing.

Taxpayers are paying billions a year to educate our children while college tuitions are increasing in part because colleges have to provide reeducation services — that is they have to teach high school (and sometimes elementary school) all over again.

The bottom line is that schools in our country are so busy teaching and trying to prove that they have taught by raising achievement scores that no one is watching the store. Schools are for children to learn.

Do not let your child go to bed celebrating an A unless he can prove to you that they still know what was on that test one month after they received the grade.

The system is fighting the wrong battle and losing the war.

Focus your energy on making sure your child has learned and let the bureaucrats and “happy with their school” parents knock themselves out losing the war and their children’s future, as well. (…)

Source: Henderson Gleaner, KY
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2008/oct/28/parents-should-focus-on-learning-more-than-on/

‘Sex education’ is a much misinterpreted phrase. The idea is not to make children more proficient at sex, the way maths education should make them better at doing sums.

That is why, when Schools Minister Jim Knight launched a review of the subject last week, he referred carefully to ‘relationship education’. The government intends some kind of tuition in ‘personal and social health’ to become compulsory in English schools, taught from the age of five. It is already a mandatory part of the curriculum in Wales and Northern Ireland.

What the precise content of those lessons will be and what right parents will have to exclude their children from them are still open to discussion. But whatever language the government prefers to use, that discussion will really be about sex.

Children already learn the facts of procreation. What worries the government is that, outside the classroom, sex is increasingly seen as a normal form of recreation. Britain has the highest level of teenage pregnancy in Europe. It also suffers from high levels of sexually transmitted infection. According to the Health Protection Agency, people aged 16-24 accounted for half of all diagnosed cases of genital warts and gonorrhoea last year and nearly two-thirds of chlamydia cases.

A poll in today’s Observer reveals one in three has had sex before the age of consent.

According to moral conservatives, this is all symptomatic of a culture of sexual licence that rejects self-restraint and abstinence. By extension, they argue, teaching children about contraception in school legitimises promiscuity and undermines parents who want to impart more traditional values to their children.

There are three problems with that argument. First, the actual content of sex education classes is not licentious. They aim to empower children to resist social pressure to have sex and to understand the risks involved. Second, advocating abstinence is fine, but teenagers still have to understand what it is they are abstaining from. Upholding ‘traditional values’ often means treating sex as taboo altogether. Third, even if it is desirable for parents to teach a responsible approach to sex, many are clearly failing to do so.

It is true that British attitudes to sex are generally permissive, as The Observer poll also shows. There is nothing wrong with that. It is certainly better than a culture of sexual repression. The important thing is not to deny that sex happens, but to teach about all the consequences. It is ignorance, not education, that puts young people at risk.

Source: Guardian Unlimited, UK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/26/sex-education-relationships

As a girl, author Peg Tyre didn’t like recess.

But as a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for Newsweek and CNN, Tyre noticed a trend: As schools across the country cut recess, music and other subjects not required by state tests, the number of students taking medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder went up.

“The American Medical Association tells us that 3 to 5 percent of Americans have ADHD,” said Tyre, who spoke at Book Passage in Corte Madera Tuesday and will appear at Redwood High School in Larkspur Thursday night. “Yet the Centers for Disease Control tell us that 14 percent of boys younger than 15 are diagnosed with the condition. I worry about why we’re medicating all these children.”

In her new book, The Trouble With Boys, Tyre argues that the changes schools have made during the past two decades - driven by a focus on standardized test scores - have created a huge disadvantage for boys.

“It used to be that boys did well in math and science, and girls did well in reading and writing,” Tyre said. “But in the last 20 years, girls have caught up in math and science, while boys have been taking a whipping in reading and have fallen behind in writing - at the same time that the whole curriculum has become literacy-based.”

In Marin, seventh-grade girls scored an average of 6 percentage points higher in English and 1 point lower in math on the 2008 California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) exam, according to the state Department of Education. Eleventh-grade girls scored 6 percentage points higher in English and 2 points higher in math on the state’s high school exit exam test for 2008.

Statewide, the gender gap is even greater, with seventh-grade girls scoring 10 percentage points higher on the English portion of the STAR and 10th-grade girls scoring 8 points higher in English on the exit exam.

The problem, Tyre argues, isn’t that boys are less intelligent or capable than girls. It’s that the two genders reach mental and emotional maturity at different ages, she said, and that schools increasingly reward skills like organization and neatness over innovation and risk-taking.

“Girls are completely mature at age 15 to 16, while boys are not there until they’re 25,” said Tyre, basing her argument on neurological studies of adolescent brain scans.

Virginia Dunn nodded in agreement.

“She’s right about the developmental pace,” said Dunn, a retired teacher who works as a reading intervention tutor and family therapist in San Rafael. “I used to teach high school, and around junior year, it was as though something magically happened, and boys began to catch up.”

At a time when success in school can determine so many aspects of people’s lives - where they work, where they live and even when they can retire - the evidence suggests the deck is stacked against boys, Tyre said.

Boys are expelled from preschool at a rate five times that of girls and are twice as likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder or a learning disability, she said. Students in the lowest-performing group at each school tend overwhelmingly to be boys, whether the school is a wealthy private institution or an impoverished neighborhood school.

“Boys learn early on that school is a game they can’t win, and so they decide they don’t want to play,” Tyre said.

Educators have addressed gender as an element of the “achievement gap” between successful and struggling students. Yet county Director of Alternative Education Lisa Schwartz noted that every student falls into a variety of groups, and that each student needs to be treated as an individual.

“Boys probably do better in a more active learning environment,” Schwartz said. “But we need to be paying attention to each individual child. Boys may need a more active, problem-solving curriculum; gifted and talented students need the opportunity to stretch themselves; our English language learners need intensive support to develop their English language skills. We need to focus on a variety of strategies to help kids succeed better in order to be doing our job.”

Tyre doesn’t assign blame to parents, teachers or even distractions like television or video games. Instead, she says parents and teachers need to work together, armed with data, to find ways to make the educational experience better for both genders.

“I grew up with teachers who told me, ‘You don’t have to be a secretary. You can be a lawyer. You don’t have to be a stewardess; you can be pilot.’ That changed the world for girls. They can apply that same attitude to boys.”

Source: Marin Independent-Journal, CA
http://www.marinij.com/ci_10787120?source=most_viewed

Although school has been back for less than a month, it is likely that many children are already experiencing frustration and confusion in math class. Research at The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada could change the way we view math difficulties and how we assist children who face those problems.

Daniel Ansari is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Western. He is using brain imaging to understand how children develop math skills, and what kind of brain development is associated with those skills.

Research shows that many children who experience mathematical difficulties have developmental dyscalculia - a syndrome that is similar to dyslexia, a learning disability that affects a child’s ability to read. Children with dyscalculia often have difficulty understanding numerical quantity. For example, they find it difficult to connect abstract symbols, such as a number, to the numerical magnitude it represents. They can’t see the connection, for instance, between five fingers and the number ‘5.’ This is similar to children with dyslexia who have difficulty connecting sounds with letters. In a recent study Ansari and graduate student Ian Holloway showed that children who are better at connecting numerical symbols and magnitudes are also those who have higher math scores. A report of this research is forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

‘Research shows that many children have both dyslexia and dyscalculia. We are now exploring further the question of exactly what brain differences exist between those who have just math problems and those who have both math and reading difficulties,’ says Ansari.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of children with math difficulties, Ansari says that it becomes clear that children with developmental dyscalculia show atypical activation patterns in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex.

This research holds tremendous promise for people who, in the past, had simply accepted that they are ‘not good at math.’ Understanding the causes and brain correlates of dyscalculia may help to design remediation tools to improve the lives of children and adults with the syndrome.

‘We have some cultural biases in North America around math skills,’ says Ansari. ‘We think that people who are good at math must be exceptionally intelligent, and even more dismaying and damaging, we have an attitude that being bad at math is socially acceptable. People who would never dream of telling others they are unable to read, will proclaim publicly they flunked math.’

Ansari says that math skills are hugely important to life success and children who suffer math difficulties may avoid careers that, with help, might be a great fit for them.

Ansari is the recipient of an Early Researcher Award grant from the Ontario government and a CIHR grant. Ansari recently reviewed existing research in this field for the April edition of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and he hopes that news of this important research will also reach parents, teachers and individuals.

An article by Ansari entitled ‘The Brain Goes to School: Strengthening the Education-Neuroscience Connection,’ will be published in the upcoming Education Canada, the magazine of the Canadian Education Association. In the article Ansari says technological advances such as fMRI have provided unprecedented insights into the working of the human brain.

‘A teacher who understands brain structure and function will be better equipped to interpret children’s behaviours, their strengths and weaknesses, from a scientific point of view, and this will in turn influence how they teach,’ says Ansari.

Source: Science Centric, Bulgaria
http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=08102244

Up to 56 per cent of trainee teachers now need multiple attempts before they pass, according to statistics.

The test is designed to drive up standards in the profession and it must be passed before students can qualify as teachers.

However, the trainee teachers are allowed to sit the test as many times as they need and record numbers are failing.

One student reportedly made 27 attempts. Meanwhile, up to a third of trainees need two attempts or more at a similar test in literacy.

The numeracy test takes 48 minutes and contains 12 mental arithmetic questions, to be completed without the aid of a calculator. There are several longer questions with data manipulation which can involve a calculator. The 45-minute literacy test is in four parts – spelling, grammar, punctuation and comprehension.

The figures, obtained in a Commons written answer by the Liberal Democrats, has reignited debate about whether the minimum qualifications for teaching was too low.

The basic skills tests are taken online in literacy, numeracy and ICT and the pass marks are 60 per cent.

In numeracy, the failure rate has risen particularly sharply since the tests were introduced in 2001. Then, trainees needed on average 1.28 attempts to pass.

Last year it was 1.56, with 34,360 trainees taking 53,600 numeracy tests between them.

For literacy, the average number of attempts required to pass was 1.14 in 2001. However, last year 35,150 trainees took 46,460 tests. Most trainees passed their ICT test first time – the average number of attempts required was 1.12.

David Laws, Liberal Democrat education spokesman, said: “The existing minimum qualifications for people wanting to become teachers are too low.

“As the number being accepted on to teaching courses rises, we need to be sure this is not being coupled with a decline in standards.

“Only if we attract the finest quality of young people into teaching will we really be able to drive-up standards in all our schools.”

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said trainees on some routes into teaching – such as on-the-job training programmes – were exempt from taking the skills tests.

“Ofsted tell us that the standard of teaching training has never been higher and big rises in results show that quality of teaching is improving massively year-in, year-out,” he said.

Soiurce: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/556szn

In India, students compete for admission into cram schools, where they study intensively in order to compete for admission into India’s highly regarded technology colleges. Their families pay as much as $1,500 a year for this opportunity, which, for many, is a great hardship. In Korea and Japan, students attend after-school classes to boost their chances for college admission.

In the U.S., by contrast, school districts and philanthropists are embarking on ever-more elaborate efforts to persuade students to care about school and to learn basic skills.

Traditionally, educators have tried to awaken intrinsic motivation in students, to engage them in the joy of learning for its own sake and, if that fails, to convince them that getting a good education is crucial to their future success.

Trying to motivate reluctant students, the New York City Department of Education has opened over 200 small high schools with catchy themes, hoping to stir student interest. The newest proposal is the Game High School, where students will play videogames that teach them the skills they need. School will, supposedly, be fun and games, instead of a series of daunting challenges with some occasional drudgery thrown in for good measure.

An even more ambitious bid to motivate low-performing students has been launched by Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad, who has provided seed money for a scheme to pay students to show up for school, behave in classes and lift their test scores. Broad has established a $44 million research center at Harvard to design and evaluate pay-for-performance plans for students in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The Broad plan is the brainchild of Harvard economist Roland Fryer. Critics predict that student motivation based on cash will end when the cash ends, but the cities involved have jumped on the incentivizing bandwagon.

Hopefully, Fryer will calculate the costs of implementing his ambitious plans–not only in these cities, but across the nation. Chester E. Finn Jr., of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, D.C., has estimated that the Chicago portion alone would cost $187 million annually if brought to scale in that city. Add in New York City, Washington, D.C., and a few other cities where performance lags–like Los Angeles, Cleveland and Detroit–and the annual costs are likely to soar into the billions.

This is money that might otherwise be spent reducing class size (New York City has the largest classes in the state), improving test scores and technology and refurbishing obsolete facilities.

Interesting, isn’t it, that while students in other countries are paying $1,500 a year for the chance to learn more, many American students will be paid that same amount just to do what they ought to be doing in their own self-interest?

Does the future belong to those who struggle to better themselves, make sacrifices to do so and work hard? Or to those who must be cajoled and bribed to learn anything at all?

Diane Ravitch is research professor of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Brookings Institution.

Source: Forbes, NY
http://tinyurl.com/6pq7e7