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How Do You Live on a Teacher's Salary?
Tweet Share on Facebook May 12, 2008 Comment (42)This morning, I opened my inbox and found an E-mail from Danny Kofke, a special education teacher in Georgia. It started on a thoughtful note. "I hope you had a nice weekend," it said. It didn't take long for Mr. Kofke to get to the point. "It seems as if everyday we hear/read about how bad the economic situation in our country is. I was wondering if I could work with you in some manner to inspire others financially?"
His tone struck me as genuine, and his offer was intriguing enough. OK, I thought, what do you have in mind, Mr. Kofke? Then came the big reveal, "I recently wrote a book, How to Survive (and Perhaps Thrive) on a Teacher's Salary." Aha! You don't really want to work with me to inspire other people: You want me to plug your book in some article. But then it occurred to me that even if his 86-page book doesn't leave every reader financially inspired, Mr. Kofke was on to something. After all, he has been able to support a family of four on his teacher's salary and has done so for a good portion of the 10 years he has been in the profession. His E-mail raised interesting and legitimate questions: What is happening to teachers who can't make ends meet during these tough economic times? And what can they do to avoid the fate of so many others who quit teaching because of low pay?
So there you have it, Mr. Kofke. You succeeded on two fronts: You got me to plug your book, and you have me thinking about doing a story about struggling teachers in a sluggish economy. Any teachers out there care to tell us your stories? (Note: Preferably not in a published format.)
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Kids Who Stay in School Stay Alive
Tweet Share on Facebook May 12, 2008 Comment (1)Whoever said it pays to stay in school has another reason to make that case, at least for kids in Baltimore. According to the Baltimore Sun, the city reviewed the files of 400 students who were shot or slain between 2003 and 2007 and found that those students had missed school an average of 46 days a year. Two thirds had been suspended or expelled at least once. Now the head of the city's public school system is "urging principals to find alternatives to suspension for nonviolent offenses to keep students off the streets," the AP reports.
In other education news, a recent report urges federal lawmakers to take action against the stereotype that all Asian-American children do well in school. The report, from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, says that "many Asian-American students are struggling, failing, and dropping out of schools that ignore their needs." Specifically, the report calls for changes to the six-year-old federal No Child Left Behind law. The AALDEF says the law masks the academic struggles of some Asian-American groups because it doesn't require states to break down the ethnicities of Asian-Americans in reporting data. In some instances, the report says, it's difficult to identify students who require more academic assistance because they face language barriers. These are legitimate concerns, but advocates shouldn't hold their breath for the current Congress to make improvements to NCLB this year.
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Teachers Are Split on Reforms, Survey Shows
Tweet Share on Facebook May 12, 2008 Comment (1)Teachers are of two minds when it comes to educational reform, with half supporting the idea of measuring teacher effectiveness according to student growth and half saying it's a poor or fair idea, according to a recent report by Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank.
The report, "Waiting to Be Won Over: Teachers Speak on the Profession, Unions, and Reform," is based on data from about 1,000 randomly selected K-12 public school teachers nationwide. (The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.) The findings point to a number of questions for reformers, including how to get rid of ineffective teachers. More than half of the teachers surveyed say it's very difficult to get rid of teachers who should not be in the classroom, and a whopping 76 percent say too many burned-out teachers keep teaching because they don't want to lose accrued benefits. Still, there was little consensus on how teachers ought to be evaluated and kept or dismissed.
"As a whole, teachers today are what political analysts might describe as 'in play' and waiting to be won over," says the report. "Despite frustrations with schools...teachers are not sold on any one reform agenda.
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Sizing Up the Charter School Movement
Tweet Share on Facebook May 6, 2008 Comment (5)It's National Charter Schools Week, and that means lots of chatter in Washington, D.C., about whether charter schools hurt or improve public education. It also means lots of parents asking how they can get their kids off charter school wait lists. That's what one parent did at a news conference this morning when the man half-jokingly asked the president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools if he could make a couple of phone calls to his daughter's would-be charter school. The question made me think about doing a future piece that offers suggestions for those anxious parents. But for now, let's focus on some developments in the charter school movement.
Nelson Smith, the president of the alliance, who—by the way—empathized with the parent of the wait-listed child (but said nothing of using his position to help the man's daughter), had some findings from a recent poll to share at today's event. The organization, which favors the expansion of charter schools, conducted a March poll of 800 registered voters and found a majority of them want more public school options. Interestingly, nearly half of those polled said they are "unsure" about charter schools. After learning from the folks conducting the poll that charter schools are public schools, a majority of the respondents said they had an interest in enrolling their children in one.
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When It's Story Time, Kids Pick the Classics
Tweet Share on Facebook May 5, 2008 Comment (2)After all the fuss that's been made over the Harry Potter books, a new study finds the classic works of Dr. Seuss, E. B. White, Judy Blume, and others easily trump J. K. Rowling's extraordinarily popular series. Along with S. E. Hinton, Laura Numeroff, Katherine Paterson, Gary Paulsen, and Harper Lee, these well-known authors have the most student readers, according to a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children nationwide.
Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham was the most popular first-grade book, according to the Renaissance Learning study, while Numeroff won over second graders with her If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. White came in No. 1 for third graders with the classic finely spun story Charlotte's Web, and Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was the favorite, somewhat predictably, with fourth graders.
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Board Games Help Kids Learn Math, Study Shows
Tweet Share on Facebook May 1, 2008 Comment (9)So it turns out that playing board games can turn your child into a math whiz. According to the research (.pdf), published in the March-April issue of the journal Child Development, number board games similar to Chutes and Ladders can help children, especially those from low-income families, develop number skills that are necessary to do well in math. Disadvantaged children tend to lag behind affluent students in math at the onset of school, and this study found that most low-income children don't have board games at home. The children in the study, 124 preschoolers in the federal Head Start program, used a board game with a spinner and took turns moving pieces along a row of numbered squares. They played four times, for 15 to 20 minutes each session, over a two-week period. At the end of the study, the preschoolers could better identify and count numbers and had a sense of which numbers hold a greater value. So maybe your child won't be solving complicated algebraic expressions right away, but at least he or she will be that much more prepared after several rounds of Chutes and Ladders.