Category Archives: Sciences

When confronted with the question of how well our schools are doing, too often we lack the full context needed to compare and understand what knowledge and skills students are acquiring to be strong citizens, competent workers, and trailblazing entrepreneurs for the next generation. Last year I told you about the Global Report Card, which found an effective way to compare the performance of school districts across America with national and international benchmarks. This week the George W. Bush Institute launched GRC version 2.0 with fresh data from 2009. Taking a look at the data, Atlantic senior editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz asks “How Does Your Child’s School Rank Against the Rest of the World?” She examines a couple districts as an example to frame the question:

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you probably are well aware of the numerous flaws in the way our K-12 education system pays teachers. Most of the flaws emanate from the single salary schedule, which the vast majority of school districts use. Pay is differentiated almost exclusively by seniority and academic credentials, factors that have very little or no impact on meeting student learning needs. Why can’t we differentiate pay based on instructional specialty, how hard it is to find someone qualified to teach in a particular area? A new report by James Shuls of the Show-Me Institute sheds some interesting light on the need for that commonsense approach. Missouri has far more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) jobs available than non-STEM jobs, so shouldn’t there be a premium for people who are qualified in those areas?

I occasionally get accused of being some kind of verbal prodigy. Less often do I get asked about my math and science skills. And frankly, it’s fine with me not to go there. But I get the scope of the problem associated with not enough students qualified and ready for careers in science, math and engineering. And so does the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI), which I told you about last December. The difference is NMSI is doing something about it — something remarkable and effective, something that has begun taking off in Colorado, as their new 4-minute video shares:

Not everything in the world of Colorado K-12 education is a serious statement about policy. Sometimes the more compelling story comes in the heat of a dramatic moment, when more is at stake than grades on a test. The Colorado Springs Gazette‘s Matt Steiner reports on a high school freshman who, when confronted with a potentially life-threatening situation, (literally) charged forward and took the wheel: [Jeremy] Rice, 14, remembered noticing the bus driver reach down for a garbage pail that had been knocked over by a student. While the bus was in motion, the driver attempted to right himself in his seat and make sure his safety belt was secure. Then, the driver tumbled to the right and down into the bus’s stairwell, Rice said. From eight rows back, Jeremy raced into action. With some instruction from the bus driver, he was able to steer the large vehicle, and the students on board, to safety.

The latest edition of the Olympic Games is almost here (who else do you know who gets to live through two different Summer Olympics at age 5?), so what better time to hand out some figurative medals to states for K-12 student learning success? A new Harvard study by Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann sheds some helpful light on trends in Achievement Growth among nations and states. The authors examine gold-standard test results of 4th and 8th graders to see where the United States’ progress from 1995 to 2009 ranks among 49 nations and how 41 individual U.S. states with enough data stack up against each other from 1992 to 2011. The good news? American students cumulatively picked up nearly a year’s worth of additional skills learned in math, science and reading, with stronger gains at the earlier grade level. The not-so-good news is we’re stuck in the middle of the pack: Students in three countries–Latvia, Chile, and Brazil–improved at an annual rate of 4 percent of a std. dev., and students in another eight countries–Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia, and Lithuania–were making gains at twice the rate of students in the United States. By […]

Raise your hand if you agree with me that the USA — and Colorado in particular — can do a better job preparing enough students for success in the areas science, math and technology. Don’t worry about feeling self-conscious if you are in a room with other people. If you can’t overcome it, at least mentally raise your hand. That’s right. If you agree with me, and I don’t see how you couldn’t, then you should be excited by some news I have to share. The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) is a four-year-old program (younger than me!) that has demonstrated successful results in increasing the number of students who pass Advanced Placement (AP) exams in math and science, particularly among underprivileged students. The Colorado Legacy Foundation has reported similar positive results here in our state for the seven schools who participated in a less-than-fully-vamped version of the program in 2010-11. The news? The effective math and science program is expanding dramatically in Colorado:

Don’t ask, because I don’t know what happened to all my time today. Rather than go in depth and expound on something profound, I will just direct you to this fascinating story in Wired magazine about “How Khan Academy is changing the rules of education”: “This,” says Matthew Carpenter, “is my favorite exercise.” I peer over his shoulder at his laptop screen to see the math problem the fifth grader is pondering. It’s an inverse trigonometric function: cos-1(1) = ? Carpenter, a serious-faced 10-year-old wearing a gray T-shirt and an impressive black digital watch, pauses for a second, fidgets, then clicks on “0 degrees.” Presto: The computer tells him that he’s correct. The software then generates another problem, followed by another, and yet another, until he’s nailed 10 in a row in just a few minutes. All told, he’s done an insane 642 inverse trig problems. “It took a while for me to get it,” he admits sheepishly. Carpenter, who attends Santa Rita Elementary, a public school in Los Altos, California, shouldn’t be doing work anywhere near this advanced…. Funny, that’s what some people say about this 5-year-old’s edublogging prowess. But I digress. The article by Clive Thompson is a […]

A random Monday posting… First of all, let me clarify that this post has nothing to do with old Star Trek movies or even older Mongol hordes. If you are interested at all in the future of education but haven’t heard of Khan Academy yet, now is the time to start getting up to speed. Khan gives every indication of being at the forefront of entrepreneurial education transformation. And you might even want to be aware of the free learning opportunities the Academy offers now! Today, Joanne Jacobs points to a California news story about Egan Junior High successfully using Khan’s online learning tools in the classroom:

The faithful readers of Ed Is Watching (I love you, mom and dad!) know that during the past two summers I have dedicated many blog posts to introducing interesting new education options in Colorado. Links to all the posts are compiled on our A Glimpse at New Schools page. This year, I’ve decided to get an earlier head start while we head for the mid-summer doldrums. To kick off the 2010-11 edition, it seems appropriate to highlight the offspring of some golden oldies. I’ve written before about West Denver Prep middle school and Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) — both top-notch, “distinguished” charter schools. The great news is that these schools won’t be contained, but rather are multiplying under successful models and sound leadership. The 2010-11 school year doubles the number of West Denver Prep campuses from two to four, with new sites shared at Lake Middle School (starting with 6th graders only) and Emerson Street School. And DSST (the original campus in the Stapleton neighborhood contains both a middle school and a high school) will open a second campus in far northeast Denver’s Green Valley Ranch. If DSST II hits the same trajectory of getting 100 percent […]

Katie Redding at the Colorado Independent reported yesterday on the official recommendations for Colorado’s application to receive Race to the Top federal reform dollars. One of my Education Policy Center friends got a chance to chime in: Ben DeGrow, education policy analyst for the free-market Independence Institute, found much to like about the application, particularly the suggestions to provide financial incentives to teachers and to attach higher funding to high-risk students (which he noted would give parents more choice about which schools could best serve their students.) There’s only so much reasonable space in an article like that one, so Ben asked me to revise and extend his remarks a bit. The “higher funding to high-risk students” is really a call for a widespread move to a transparent Weighted Student Funding formula that empowers parents and school-level leaders at the expense of central administration bureaucrats. Ben further cited Cole Arts and Science Academy as Colorado’s premier example of “Turning Around Low-Performing Schools.”