Dear Dr. Fournier: I have two children in school, and I am concerned that they might not be receiving a well-rounded education. In past columns, you discuss the importance of preparing our children for a new global work force, and you emphasize how quickly our world is changing. While this may be true, I am not sure that our schools are adapting at the same pace. Some schools are making small strides, but I am not sure that the implementation takes place. When looking back on the past semester, I don’t see much evolution in our school’s curriculum. Is there anything I can do to enrich my children’s education and provide them with the knowledge and skills they will need for the ever-changing future?

Assessment: Unfortunately, your concerns are warranted; the American educational system is in need of change. Many schools are oblivious to the evolving world around them. Even schools that understand the need for change often don’t know how to proceed. In the old educational paradigm of the 19th and 20th centuries, students were often measured by the amount of correct work they could complete. A student who could successfully complete 100 math problems and diagram 20 sentences for homework was considered better prepared than a student who only completed 50 problems and 10 sentences.

In the new educational paradigm, more work is not always better. In fact, more work can often be a waste of time. In today’s world, computers and machines do rote tasks much more efficiently than humans, but there is one thing that machines can’t do: think creatively. The person who can calculate 100 complex math problems in a minute may be considered a savant, but that talent is of little use in today’s world. On the other hand, mathematicians and computer programmers who develop high-level computer applications that solve technical problems will be in demand for their skills. If our students aren’t prepared for this competitive environment, they will be left behind by emerging students around the world.

What to do: You are correct that many schools do not teach for the future, and if your students are in this situation, then you must take action. First, make an appointment to speak with your students’ teachers or principal. Explain your concerns and offer ideas that could facilitate change. Parents need to be proactive and not feel that they don’t have a voice in their children’s education.

Secondly, parents can play an important role in their children’s education through alternative modes of learning. The summer allows parents to invest their time and efforts into these avenues. Take your child to the museum or library and engage your child’s mind with questions and activities. If you attend an exhibit on astronomy, check out a book on planets from the library and give your child a fun follow-up project. Most importantly, find out which subjects are interesting to your child and make the exercise interesting. This will capture your student’s curiosity, and he or she will remember that learning can be fun.

During the school year, many students become disengaged because teachers overwhelm them with work that is repetitive and a waste of time. Parents then become discouraged when their children don’t show an interest in school. Not only is the work boring but also rote homework assignments keep students from spending time with their families. Use the summer to reconnect with your children and instill in them a passion for learning. Ultimately, a child’s education is not the responsibility of the teacher, the school or the government. Parents must take a stand for the education of their children.

Source: Ventura County Star, CA
http://tinyurl.com/5bt6d4

Lack of basic numeracy skills among adults is undermining the economy, according to a leading MP.

Slow progress in recent years towards boosting standards of mathematics is leading to a “huge amount of human potential being wasted”, said Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons public accounts committee.

According to latest figures, around 23.8 million adults have numeracy skills below a C grade GCSE.

This includes 6.8m without even the most basic functional maths skills needed to pay household bills, understand wage slips and read train timetables.

Ministers want to make sure that by 2020, almost all adults have the skills in the three Rs that they need for daily life.

But according to a report published today, only two per cent of workers who lack basic maths gained a qualification in numeracy under the Government’s Skills for Life scheme since 2001.

The National Audit Office warned ministers that their 2020 targets were at risk and called for thousands more maths teachers to help boost skills among adults.

Many people had a “phobia” of maths or were too ashamed of their inability to add up to enrol on courses, the report said.

Mr Leigh said: “This is a big problem. The UK has a greater proportion of adults with the lowest level literacy and numeracy skills than many of its international competitors.

“Given the greater scale of the problem in numeracy, it is disappointing that the [Government] has done less well in raising numeracy standards.

“These figures paint a picture of a huge amount of human potential being wasted. People are having to get by in life without the skills of a capable school leaver, which isn’t good for the individual, their family, or for economy.”

The Government wants 2.25m adults to take part in Skills for Life courses between 2001 and 2010.

According to the NAO, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills is on track to meet the target.

But they say more people aged over 16 have been signed on to literacy courses because they are seen as easier.

“To meet the numeracy target it will need to do much more,” said the report.

“Research indicates that poor numeracy, rather than poor literacy, is associated with low economic wellbeing,” it added. “Attitudes towards numeracy and maths range from apathy to phobia. Respondents talked of people being ’scared’ of numeracy, that mathematics is seen as a ‘difficult’ subject and only to be understood by ‘clever’ people.”

David Lammy, the skills minister, said: “Good literacy, language and numeracy skills are vital.

“Too many adults don’t have the necessary basic skills to build a better life. We have made excellent progress since our Skills for Life strategy was launched in 2001, with nearly two million adults gaining a first qualification since then.

“But we are not at all complacent. Processes are already in place to address some of the NAO’s concerns.”

Skills for Life courses cover literacy, numeracy and English as a Second Language (ESOL). Some £5bn has been spent on the programme so far.

It said demand for English as a second language courses - which were the most expensive to run - outstripped supply, particularly in London.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/6sb4a9

Freshmen at the University of Washington can’t solve middle school math problems. So said 60 of their professors in an open letter released this spring. If you thought math was a problem just for those students struggling to pass the WASL and graduate from high school, it’s time to take a second look.

This is my 40th year as a math teacher. I have taught gifted students who intuitively speak the language of calculus. I have also taught those who, because of drugs or difficult home situations, cannot retain what they learn from one day to the next. But for most of my students, the attitude they and their parents bring into the classroom can make all the difference in the world.

There is little doubt that there is a huge discrepancy between the minimum high school mathematics requirement for graduation (passing the WASL or one of its alternatives) and the level of mathematical proficiency necessary to succeed in college and the careers that lie ahead for most of today’s students. As teachers and parents, we do everyone a disservice if we tell them getting by in math is good enough. If we expect more, we’ll get more.

Having taught in public schools for 25 years, I’ve seen many students thrive there. Their success is driven by their willingness and the commitment of their parents to be aggressive in their approach to education. Those students have learned to seek out teachers for help, do what they are asked to do and take the demanding classes that sometimes require them to move out of their comfort zone.

For the past 15 years, I’ve taught at an independent school where every graduate goes on to college. Here I find students with that same drive. What’s different in an independent school classroom is that small class size guarantees that I, as a teacher, have time to help each student. Because of the huge demands put on public school teachers, getting individual attention may require more effort and determination. But dedicated teachers love to help and committed parents and students will find what they need, if they look for it.

The results can be amazing. Charles Wright Academy accepts students who are average and above and half of them take Advanced Placement calculus. Yet statewide, fewer than 10 percent of students take an AP math test. We can and must do better.

Ultimately, the responsibility rests on students. Parents, please don’t be intimidated by math or treat it as a subject your child is either good at or not good at.

Ask them: Are you really doing everything you can to succeed? Have you explored every challenge and taken every opportunity to find support, guidance and help? If they haven’t, then you’re not doing your job as a parent and they’re not doing their job as students.

If you’re wondering why it matters, just ask yourself, how important is this child and her future to you and to our society?

Howard Wouters taught math for 25 years at Clover Park High School and joined the faculty of Charles Wright Academy, an independent college prep school 15 years ago. In 1999, he received the Parent Association’s Inspirational Faculty Award.

Source: Seattle Post Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/365786_math05.html

Children who take part in a business education scheme at school go on to earn a third more than their peers and gain critical life skills, research found today.

The findings were welcomed by the Gazette’s finalist in the If We Can, You Can entrepreneurial challenge, Matt Stirland, who yesterday revealed that he planned to take business classes into local secondary schools.

A six-month study by FreshMinds consultancy found that graduates of the Young Enterprise Company Programme were typically earning between £40,000 and £45,000 after they reached the age of 30.

But their classmates who did not take part in the programme, which involves setting up and running a real company with help from a business volunteer, were earning just £26,000 to £30,000.

The research also said that through the scheme, children had developed better skills in areas such as risk-taking, teamwork, presentation and self-motivation. Mr Stirland said these were more important than financial reward.

He said: “Pay doesn’t inspire me, although if people develop business skills the money will follow. The value of schemes like this is that they teach young people how to market a business idea to customers and how to learn from failure.”

Rachael Anderton, the Young Enterprise charity’s deputy chief executive, said that almost six out of 10 pupils who had been on the scheme said they had a “good understanding” of career options when they left school. But only 46% of those who did not take part agreed.

Source: nebusiness.co.uk, UK
http://tinyurl.com/52gqh2

Boys outperform girls on math tests given to children worldwide, but the gender gap is less pronounced in countries where women and men have similar rights and opportunities, according to a new study.

“In more gender-neutral societies, girls are as good as boys in mathematics,” study author Paola Sapienza said in an interview.

The issue of a gender gap in math has been hotly debated, with some suggesting biology may be behind higher scores for boys on some tests and others pointing to environmental and cultural factors.

Sapienza, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, examined the results of boys and girls on the Program for International Student Assessment. That test is given to 15-year-olds around the world every three years.

Among 40 countries studied, Iceland was the only one where girls did better than boys on the math test.

In about a dozen countries, both sexes scored about the same. In many of those places, like in Iceland, men and women have similar opportunities and rights, according to the study, which was published in the journal Science.

To assess sexual equality, Sapienza looked at several measures, including the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, which considers economic, educational and political opportunities for women.

The United States fell in the middle of the pack in terms of both equality for women and the gender gap in math.

In a few countries where girls do not have the same opportunities as boys, girls score about the same as boys on the math test, the report found. These included Indonesia and Thailand.

There also are countries, such as Germany, where there is widespread sexual equality but where a girl-boy math gap exists anyway. The study did not attempt to explain such anomalies.

The study was reviewed by a panel of outside experts.

In reading, girls outperformed boys on the PISA exam in every country studied. That gap does not shrink but widens in places where women are said to have general equality with men.

“The math gap disappears, and the reading gap becomes even bigger,” Sapienza said.

The study did not look at the reasons behind those trends.

Former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers ignited debate over gender gaps a few years ago year when he suggested innate differences between the sexes might help explain why comparatively few women excelled in science and math careers.

The PISA exam is different from other tests in that it assesses how well students can apply mathematical reasoning to real-world situations rather than testing their knowledge of math content.

Source: New Zealand Herald, New Zealand
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/6/story.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10513442

American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “Our best thoughts come from others.”

The problem is, for different reasons many people derail learning by drawing their conclusions too soon, based on incomplete information. They inadvertently close themselves off from an array of enriching resources.

Last year, in the Washington Post’s “How to Keep America Competitive” (Feb. 25), Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corporation, wrote, “Innovation is the source of U.S. economic leadership and the foundation for competitiveness in the global economy,” with its workforce as “the most important factor.”

He argued, “if we are to remain competitive, we need a workforce that consists of the world’s brightest minds.” There’s nothing to disagree with here.

Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek affirmed, the U.S. system “is very good at developing the critical faculties of the mind,” and reminds us that foreign governments send observers to U.S. schools “to learn how to create a system that nurtures and rewards ingenuity, quick thinking, and problem-solving.”

Gates has called for “strong schools” for “young Americans (to) enter the workforce with the math, science and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the knowledge economy.” He laments, out of 29 industrialized nations surveyed, U.S. high school students ranked 24th on an international math test in 2003.

In 2007, he wrote about America’s “crisis point”: computer science employment is “growing by nearly 100,000 jobs annually,” but there’s a “dramatic decline in the number of students graduating with computer science degrees.”

Yet, 25 years ago America’s National Commission on Excellence in Education reported in “A Nation At Risk” that “Our Nation is at risk … the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

“What was unimaginable a generation ago,” the April 1983 report says, “has begun to occur - others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”

The report recommended, among other things, “far more homework”; the teaching of English, mathematics, science, social studies, computer science, each area with specific purposes; as well as the learning of a foreign language in elementary grades.

Falling behind

“Wake up. We are falling behind daily,” the April 30 USA Today’s Greg Toppo quoted Bob Compton of Harvard Business School, an entrepreneur, angel investor, and professional venture capitalist, who has been active in over 30 businesses.

Erik Hromadka’s “2 Million Minutes, How high school students in China, India and Indiana are spending their time,” in the February Indiana Business cover story, “Is Time Running Out?” is a must read.

In 2005, Compton traveled on business across India, to which a growing number of U.S. technology jobs are “being outsourced” — an “economic tectonic shift” taking place in the world. He said he found his “seminal moment” when he asked 5- and 6-year-old first graders in a Bangalore classroom what they want to be when they grow up. “Most of them said engineers or scientists,” compared to American children who “aspired to be rock stars and professional athletes .

The one word that was never mentioned (by American children) was ‘engineer’ and that just shook me to the core.”

Compton sees “strong math and science skills … will allow people in the 21st century to earn high wages,” and that “capital and opportunity are going to flow to where the brains are.”

Compton set out to spend 20 months to make the documentary film “Two Million Minutes” (www.2Mminutes.com) about how high school students in Bangalore, students in Shanghai, and at Indiana’s Carmel High School, among the top five percent of high schools in the U.S., compare and contrast; how they allocate their time in class and at home studying, playing sports, working, sleeping, goofing off, “affecting their economic prospects for the rest of their lives.”

As Toppo reported, the film “finds plenty (for Americans) to be worried about: not enough study or homework time, not enough parental pressure, not enough focus on math or engineering. American teens … are preoccupied with sports, after-school jobs and leisure.”

Americans need to be concerned about their ability to remain globally competitive.

Source: Pacific Daily News, GU
http://tinyurl.com/5rp2ys

Every school has at least one incompetent teacher who should be helped to improve or “moved on”, the schools minister, Jim Knight, has said.

Over the course of a career, one bad teacher can undermine thousands of children’s education, he said, adding that it was a “social justice issue” to ensure every teacher is up to scratch.

The government is developing plans to remove more under-performing teachers but is hoping to enlist the support of the teaching unions in order to avoid a “massive fight” with the 400,000-strong profession, Knight said. The schools secretary, Ed Balls, promised new moves to root out teachers whose “competence falls to unacceptably low levels” in his children’s plan last year.

The General Teaching Council for England (GTCE) has suggested that under-performing teachers should be moved to neighbouring schools to retrain.

In an interview with the Guardian, Knight dismissed estimates over the last year of between 17,000 and 24,000 incompetent teachers in schools, saying there was no firm evidence to put a number on low-performing teachers.

But he said: “If you spoke to anybody about their experience in school and asked them whether there was a teacher who probably should have been doing something else, probably every one of us would say, yeah, we remember that teacher. What we need to do is be able to find a way of helping those people either achieve what they came into teaching for, the moral purpose of helping every child achieve their full potential … or helping them move on to something they will be better at. But we’ve got to do that with the support of the profession, because it’s about raising the esteem of the profession.”

Teachers should receive extensive support to improve, for instance from in-school training with high-performing colleagues, he said. He wanted a discussion with the teacher unions about “what we can do to help those teachers teach better, and if they are not capable of teaching better how to help them move on. That’s a discussion I need to have about whether or not they [the unions] can help us with this.”

He went on: “They were rightly and understandably expressing the concerns … about their members about us signalling in the children’s plan that we want to do something about under-performing teachers, because if that is a code for giving headteachers a licence to be unreasonable about things, then obviously they’ve got a job to do to protect their members. But I want to work with them. What I don’t want to do is end up in a massive fight with 400,000 teachers, given that we’re told by inspectors that the vast majority are doing a really good job.”

Teaching unions have warned that promises in last December’s children’s plan to tackle under-performing teachers would lead to headteachers being given a licence to sack poor-performing staff.

The GTCE has expressed concerns that it has judged only 46 registered teachers “incompetent” since it was established because local authorities have not been referring teachers to it.

It is thought that too many teachers are being “recycled” through the system, moving on to other schools before headteachers can sack them or refer them to the GTCE.

Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, said: “There is no evidence of thousands of under-performing teachers in schools. His [Knight’s] comments will only serve to demoralise 400,000 teachers. There is a structured capability procedure which takes 12 weeks and works. Complaints that 12 weeks is too long are unfounded when you consider the fact that you may be changing someone’s whole career. It’s ill-conceived.”

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said the moves could lead to headteachers “bullying” teachers: “The current capability procedures are good, tough and fair on all sides.”

Source: guardian.co.uk, UK
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2282284,00.html

It’s time to abolish the six-week summer holiday. Children’s maths and English skills suffer from it, and boredom leads to petty crime

The Victorians worried that going to school might interfere with a child’s ability to bring in an income for his or her family. So compulsory schooling in its earliest incarnation was very much geared around the needs of children as earners, rather than learners. The starting age was set at five so that children could finish school and start full-time work as soon as possible. A long summer holiday freed up children to work in the fields during the summer picking season.

Fast forward 150 years or so, and many of the features of the original system have stuck - perhaps most notably the long summer holiday. Isn’t it now time to revisit how the school year is structured?

Educational research is unambiguous: a long summer break is an impediment to children’s learning. Studies carried out in the US and the UK show what should be intuitively obvious: with a long break from studying maths and English, children’s abilities take a dive over the summer in both areas. Worryingly, the dip in reading seems to be largest for children from poorer homes, who already start off at a well-documented disadvantage (particularly in England).

This is probably partly down to the quality of children’s educational experiences during the holidays. We know that children from more affluent homes are more likely to have parents who have enjoyed positive experiences of education themselves, and who therefore tend to have more positive attitudes towards their children’s education and more educational resources (like books and games) in the home. Children from better-off families are also more likely to have access to the structured, educational activities in their summer holidays that research has shown are so important for their personal and intellectual development.

Many children say they have little to do over the summer - one survey of 16,000 young people found that eight in 10 said they had little to do outside school. Bored children and young people are a recipe for the higher levels of anti-social behaviour and petty crime we see over the summer - particularly towards the end of the six-week break.

Add to that the fact that the long summer holiday has long been the bane of families with two working parents - many of whom struggle to arrange childcare for their children over the break - and it seems there is a strong case for reconsidering how the school year is arranged.

As part of a broader package of reforms - including giving the curriculum for 5-7 year olds a greater emphasis on school readiness skills and learning through play, providing school counsellors, and broadening curriculum and assessment to focus on a more diverse set of skills - this change would help to address the stalling in standards witnessed in recent years. And it would also make the lives of many working parents a little bit easier.

Source: Guardian Unlimited, UK
http://tinyurl.com/5c2nom

Australian children should be learning a second language from early childhood to keep up with their European and Asian counterparts, a leading language expert said.

University of Queensland Professor Ken Wiltshire has called on state and federal governments to do more to encourage children to learn a second, or even third language.

“In Europe it’s now going to be compulsory for children to learn two languages and ideally three,” he said.

“In Australia kids get an exposure to foreign language for about four or five years from primary school but from then on they can actually escape it, which is a great pity.”

He said Australia’s physical isolation and the position of English as a global language meant many did not see the need to learn another language.

However, he said being fluent in only one language meant Australians would miss out on cultural experiences and it could also prove a disadvantage in international business.

Professor Wiltshire, formerly Australia’s representative on the executive board of United Nations Education Sciences and Culture Organisation (UNESCO), said foreign languages needed to be included in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s “education revolution”.

He said while Mr Rudd’s fluency in Mandarin provided a good role model, the prime minister needed to do more to encourage young Australians.

“There is no point in having a prime minister who speaks Mandarin if he doesn’t introduce good coherent policies that are going to encourage foreign languages,” he said.

Part of the problem was a shortage of foreign language teachers, Prof Wiltshire said, and measures similar to those implemented by the Rudd Government to encourage maths and science teachers were necessary.

“If we can have special incentives and HECS exemptions for science and mathematics teachers why can’t we do it for foreign language teachers?”

Ideally, he said, Australians should learn two foreign languages - one Asian and one European.

“There is a wonderful emphasis in Australia on the importance of early childhood and what would be better than if all these early childhood centres start introducing children to some aspects of a foreign language”.

Source: Courier Mail, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23745220-5003402,00.html

A new report declares that a “boy crisis” in education doesn’t exist and that both sexes are about equal in their standardized tests scores. At least that’s the analysis of 40 years of these tests by the American Association of University Women, which promotes gender equity for women.

So much for those of us who have doggedly maintained that single-sex education — bitterly opposed by some women groups — is far better in the below high school grades, when boys and girls would seem to learn at a distinctly different pace, one that puts male pupils at a disadvantage. But then our contentions are unsubstantiated by anything other than personal experience, clearly making them invalid. Observations from the parenting and grand parenting of 13 children hardly can compare with certified academic analysis.

The study states that success in school depends more on family income and ethnicity (African and Hispanic Americans do worse, it says) than any sign that female teachers might quite naturally possess traits and skills in exercising their craft that are far more favorable to girls. It is a myth apparently that the verbal and cognitive abilities come earlier to girls, that their attention spans are longer and their understanding of written assignments generally keener than those of their male counterparts of the same age and that boys exposed to male teachers do well.

Those boys who don’t progress at the same speed are, as we all know, “late bloomers.” There is nothing to worry about as the AAUW study of the tests from fourth grade to college shows. Junior as we all know will come along even if he is now fidgeting, pounding on his seatmate, or staring out the window as if in a trance even when not zonked out on some anti-hyper drug. He is just a bit of a dreamer who ultimately will overcome these traits and turn toward math and other scientific disciplines with such fervor as to completely overwhelm any female competitor.

Like boxers, education theorists spend a great deal of their time jabbing and counterpunching one another with tests and studies to build support for their opinions on how to save the public schools. In the process much of what is just plain common sense disappears in a welter of statistics that appear irrefutable, if obvious, but completely miss the point. Boys do catch up, given half a chance. Girls certainly can be superlative mathematicians (my daughter is one), and parental support is obviously vitally important to academic progress. Children of families who can afford books and other educational tools are bound to do better. How startling is that?

But the elusive point is that despite all the stats, separate classes for the sexes are a good idea in theory but are impractical it seems in reality. Why? Because those teaching the boys most likely would be women, not the males that could both understand their charges and provide them with authoritative role models. The public school system from the first to the ninth grades has been the overwhelming domain of women for a variety of reasons. This matriarchal society subconsciously has created an atmosphere, set an agenda and established the standards that clearly favor girls, at least in the early stages. There is nothing sinister about this and they will deny it until hell freezes over. But every parent with a mixed household of children who is paying attention can attest to its authenticity.

There is nothing sexist in single sex education. It is just a practical solution that probably will never come about in any widespread way. The social interplay between the genders at that level can be accomplished in a variety of ways including recess and mixed activities during and after school. But again this isn’t likely to take place anytime soon, certainly not as long as there are studies like the AAUW’s that miss the point.

Source: Scripps News, DC
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/33410