August 2009 Archives

Long Beach Superintendent Chris Steinhauser on Thursday praised Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's call for a special session of the legislature to pass reforms that the governor says are needed to make California eligible for a $4.35 billion competitive federal grant program for education.

Those "Race to the Top" funds were approved by the U.S. Congress as part of the stimulus package.

"We desperately need and deserve these funds in Long Beach," Steinhauser said in a statement. "We must not allow archaic state laws to prevent our local schools from receiving their fair share of money."

A possible stumbling block for California to receive the funds is a requirement that states allow the use of student achievement data to evaluate teachers. Schwarzenegger is calling legislators to change California law, which currently bars that practice. Schwarzenegger, who called for the special session Thursday, declared that such a session must be held no later than Oct. 5.

Community members are invited to Long Beach City College the morning of Thursday, August 20, to share their ideas on how to improve educational attainment for Latinos as part of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.

Information from these sessions will be collected and will serve as the foundation for a new presidential executive order that will govern the White House Initiative, officials said.
Community members may attend one of two sessions offered. The first session runs from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., and the second session runs from 10:45 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.

Both will be take place at the Large Meeting Room in Building O South, at 4900 Conant Street, on the LBCC Liberal Arts Campus in Long Beach, 90808.

Most states, including California, have banned corporal punishment in schools. But a recent study of the states that do allow it found that  "more than 200,000 schoolchildren are paddled, spanked or subjected to other physical punishment each year, and disabled students get a disproportionate share of the treatment," according to this New York Times article. The article gave an example of an autistic child who received a spanking. An excerpt:

"Most states prohibit corporal punishment in public schools, but 20 do not. The two watchdog groups that collaborated on the report, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, are urging federal and state lawmakers to extend the ban nationwide and enact an immediate moratorium on physical punishment of students with disabilities."

US News and World Report's controversial college rankings are coming out soon. They have been much criticized in the past. The latest criticism centers around a part of the methodology in which university presidents are asked to rate their peers. But some presidents disagree so much with that element of the rankings that they have refused to participate, according to this article in Inside Higher Ed. Now a new study casts doubt on how meaningful peer rankings can be. By the way, the controversy was further heightened when a document was leaked showing that one college president ranked his institution above all others. An excerpt:

"The new study found less matching with intangibles than with specific qualities that may not always associate with quality or with the missions of some programs. For example, the study found that peer assessments correlate with the size of programs in all five areas analyzed: business, education, engineering, law and medicine. Peer reviewers also seem to place a high emphasis on standardized test scores, with the average score significant for all of the graduate categories except education. Test scores also appear to have the greatest influence on the reputation (as measured by the survey) in law and medical schools."

According to this internet article by the New York Times, some say no. Excerpt:

"But current teacher training has a large chorus of critics, including prominent professors in education schools themselves. For example, the director of teacher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Katherine Merseth, told a conference in March that of the nation's 1,300 graduate teacher training programs, only about 100 were doing a competent job and "the others could be shut down tomorrow.""

The Times has quotes from experts expressing opinions on the question.

A federal court has ruled that California can administer its high school exit exam and other state education tests in the English language, even to English learners, according to this story in the San Francisco Chronicle. An excerpt:

The law does not authorize a court to act as "the official second-guesser" of the reliability of a state's testing methods, Justice Timothy Reardon said in Thursday's ruling, which upheld a San Francisco judge's 2007 decision.

He also said developing native-language tests would be difficult, because students in California speak at least 40 languages. The state's voters approved a ballot measure in 1998 that prohibits bilingual instruction except in limited cases, Reardon said, and testing students in their primary language "could send confusing messages throughout California's education system."

The U.S. House of Representative is considering abandoning an 11-year-old law that forbig colleges students convicted of illegal drug possession from getting federal financial aid, according to this report from McClatchy Newspapers. Those convicted of selling illegal drugs would continue to be barred from getting federal financial aid, according to the story. What do you think of this? Curious to hear your thoughts. An excerpt from the story:

The bill, which a House of Representatives committee approved recently and which the full House probably will consider after its August recess, says that those convicted of selling illegal drugs still would be barred from receiving federal financial aid.

However, students convicted of possession would be able to get loans, grants and work-study assistance.

"People who have been convicted of a drug crime are punished through our criminal justice system, which is entirely proper," said Melissa Salmanowitz, a spokeswoman for the Education and Labor Committee.

"Doubling a person's punishment - outside of our criminal justice system - by not allowing them needed financial aid to obtain a college degree is not only wrong, it's double jeopardy."

This is an interesting article that appeared in the Vancouver Sun about how universities and colleges are offering free courses online. The trend has led YouTube to create an education channel, YouTube EDU. An excerpt:

Among the thousands of videos on YouTube EDU are the celebrated classroom theatrics of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physics professor Walter Lewin, whose clips have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Other leading institutions of higher education posting videos to YouTube include the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.

Interested in dentistry? Then the YouTube channel of the University of Michigan School of Dentistry may be the place for you, serving up a total of 426 videos.

According to a study reported by the Associated Press, injuries to American children during physical education classes increased by 150 percent from 1997-2007. An excerpt:

Yet that may have less to do with lively gym programs than with lack of adult supervision, experts said. A decline in school nurses and larger class sizes could be to blame, said the study's senior author Lara McKenzie of Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

"Children got hurt by running into equipment or having contact with structures or other persons," McKenzie said. "They had heat stroke, fainting and heart palpitations." Boys had more cuts and broken bones than girls. Girls were more likely to suffer strains and sprains.

While the benefits of physical education classes outweigh the risks, McKenzie said, "being healthy doesn't have to hurt."