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Education Roundup: Teachers Should Tread Lightly When Teaching Politics
Tweet Share on Facebook December 30, 2011 CommentWelcome to the new High School Notes weekly roundup of education news. Every Friday, you'll find out what's making headlines around the Web.
Teaching politics
With the Republican presidential campaign in full swing, history and government teachers have a good opportunity to talk about politics with their students. But, according to an article in the StarTribune, they should tread carefully when expressing their own views—being sure to "not [tell] students what to think, but [to give] them more to think about."
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Abstinence-Only Education Debate Resurfaces
Tweet Share on Facebook December 28, 2011 Comment (4)A longtime controversial topic on Capitol Hill, the debate over the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education, has resurfaced. In the 2012 budget, signed by President Obama last week, the House Appropriations Committee set aside $5 million for abstinence education programs, which don't teach students about birth control methods and instead encourage teens to wait until marriage before they have sex.
Two of the largest federal programs funding abstinence education, the Community-Based Abstinence Education grant program and the Adolescent Family Life Act, were abolished in 2010 under President Obama. Between 1996 and 2009, more than $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars were spent funding abstinence education.
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Education Roundup: Teacher Tenure Argument Rages
Tweet Share on Facebook December 23, 2011 CommentWelcome to the new High School Notes weekly roundup of education news. Every Friday, you'll find out what's making headlines around the Web.
Teacher tenure
A Deseret News article explores both sides of the teacher tenure argument. Reformers argue that many tenured teachers become complacent with their job security. Meanwhile, educators say that abolishing tenure would hurt faculty morale and discourage college graduates from entering the teaching field. States such as Idaho, Tennessee, and Florida are working on laws that would abolish or severely limit tenure.
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Parents: Help Your Kids Make the Most of Winter Break
Tweet Share on Facebook December 21, 2011 CommentWith cold weather, the holidays, and plenty of distractions, it can be tough to get motivated over winter break. But the holiday break is also one of the best times for high school students to do independent research, take an educational trip, or volunteer in the community.
Studies have shown that students lose up to two months of math and reading knowledge over summer break. While winter break is much shorter, Yvette Jackson, CEO of the National Urban Alliance, a nonprofit that focuses on improving student engagement in low-income schools, says teachers should give students a fun project to work on over break to keep them interested in what they're studying.
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Teachers Publish Their Own Textbooks
Tweet Share on Facebook December 19, 2011 CommentWhen David Rockwood, a teacher at Payson High School in Utah, decided to combine two of his areas of expertise—athletics and psychology—into a new course, he ran into one major roadblock: There were no sports psychology textbooks targeted to a high school audience. So, he decided to write one himself.
Rockwood is reportedly one of a handful of high school teachers nationwide who have written textbooks for their classrooms. There are many reasons a teacher might write a textbook: for niche courses, such as sports psychology, for which a suitable book doesn't exist; to self-publish supplementary material for a class; or because sudden curriculum changes can put widely used textbooks out of date.
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Education Roundup: Half of Schools Fail to Meet 'No Child' Standards
Tweet Share on Facebook December 16, 2011 CommentWelcome to the new High School Notes weekly roundup of education news. Every Friday, you'll find out what's making headlines around the Web.
No Child Left Behind
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's prediction last March that 82 percent of American public schools would "fail" to meet No Child Left Behind standards missed the mark. It turns out that 48 percent of U.S. schools—the largest percentage since the law was enacted 10 years ago—failed to meet the "adequate yearly progress" benchmarks imposed under the law that says schools must increase the number of students performing at or above grade level each year.
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Better High School Graduation Rates May Be An Illusion
Tweet Share on Facebook December 14, 2011 Comment (2)Over the past several years, high school graduation rates nationwide have improved. On Monday, the Florida Department of Education announced the state's graduation rate hit a record high of 80.1 percent. But don't expect those numbers to continue rising, due to a federal mandate that takes effect next year.
New federal rules that mandate states to report graduation rates uniformly will go into effect for the class of 2012, meaning states, including Florida, will no longer be able to count students who finish special education and adult education programs in their state graduation rates.
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Teachers: Don't Overlook Value of Field Trips
Tweet Share on Facebook December 12, 2011 Comment (5)Chopped budgets and an increased focus on testing have made field trips, once a popular way to get students out of the classroom, increasingly rare.
"Local school districts don't have the funds anymore," says Stephanie Norby, director of the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian museums are some of the most popular field trip destinations in the country. Although there is little hard data to definitively prove that schools are taking fewer field trips, Norby says it seems as though fewer schools have visited the Smithsonian in recent years. "For local schools, I think it's become more difficult for them to take trips."
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Education Roundup: Was One of America's Best High Schools Ruined By the Principal?
Tweet Share on Facebook December 9, 2011 CommentWelcome to the new High School Notes weekly roundup of education news. Every Friday, you'll find out what's making headlines around the Web.
School administration
During Valerie Reidy's first 10 years as principal of Bronx High School of Science, dozens of teachers quit or were forced out as she placed a larger emphasis on testing. Meanwhile, the number of students taking—and passing—Advanced Placement tests has increased during her tenure, yet disgruntled former teachers say she belittled them and changed their proven teaching methods. New York Magazine's interesting profile of the school pits reformers against traditionalists.
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Green Ribbons to be Awarded to Sustainable Schools
Tweet Share on Facebook December 7, 2011 Comment (2)With its new "Green Ribbon" program, announced in April, the Department of Education will honor public schools of all levels that are taking steps to be environmentally conscious. States will begin nominating schools this month, and the awards will be announced sometime this spring. Many schools are catching the green bug, even if they weren't originally built to be sustainable—but all schools can take easy steps to lower their carbon footprints, experts say.
"Pretty much any school can save about 30 percent of [its] energy bill with behavior modification," says Ted Bardacke, a senior associate at Global Green USA, a nonprofit focused on sustainability and environmental awareness. "Just having a green building does not a green school make."
