America is an aging nation. A recent Education Week article entitled, “In Districts Where Seniors Outnumber Children, Schools Adjust,” points out that “[s]eniors now outnumber students in more than 900 counties across the U.S., and that “seniors outnumber schoolchildren by more than 2-to-1 in 33 counties,” according to recent numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau. This can have a significant effect on education funding, as senior citizens are statistically more likely to favor lower taxes and cuts in education spending. The same article points out, however, that some of these counties have found ways to minimize this effect by involving the local senior population in the school experience. In a book published several years ago entitled, Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform American — And the World, Peter G. Peterson explored not only these implications in the U.S. but also aging trends worldwide.

Today, let’s look at the United States. The Allegheny Valley school district in Pennsylvania fosters “good will” between young students and the aging population by avoiding pushes for tax increases, as well as by hosting a yearly senior brunch and inviting the seniors to academic presentations and Veteran’s Day activities. Sumter County, Florida, which has one of the largest senior-to-student ratios in the country, teaches lifelong learning courses on one of its campuses, which also organized a volunteer corps where participating seniors donate 6,000 to 7,000 hours a year. These programs have been successful in involving seniors in education and encouraging them to take an interest in children’s lives. The direct benefits for students who interact with seniors, however, could be proportionately greater. Most important, these communities value the wisdom seniors can impart to young people providing a role for seniors in their golden years and showing young people how to build valuable relationships with mentors who can help them.

The program Elias suggests is one of many possible ways to involve seniors in the classroom to their and the students’ mutual benefit. As they share in these experiences, teachers will have a unique opportunity to form bridges across the generation gap that will influence their students (and participating seniors) for the rest of their lives. Students today need experience, wisdom, and positive role models. Every community, regardless of religious, political, or social affiliation, can benefit from this collaboration.

Education in the arts can do more than boost a student’s creativity. A new report by the National Endowment for the Arts shows high school students who had “arts-rich experiences” had a higher overall GPA than students who weren’t involved in the arts. The report also found disadvantaged high school students involved in the arts were more likely to enroll in competitive colleges than their peers who weren’t involved, according to the article “Arts Involvement Narrows Student Achievement Gap.“

Art education has shown to make a positive impact on student success, but it runs counter to the belief that testing and more rigorous programs aimed at raising math and reading scores is the answer to higher graduation rates and lower dropout rates. How does art  make students a better at solving math problems or reading a book? For one, students are engaged by these creative activities, making them more likely to attend and participate in class. A music, theater, dance, or visual arts class might be the only motivation a student has to come to school on any given day and increases the odds they will make it to their academic classes as well.

For some at-risk students, their involvement in the arts might be the first thing they’ve excelled at and been encouraged to pursue. When students find their niche, they might be more motivated to continue down the path of success and translate the hard work and payoff they’ve seen in action to their other studies. It’s not the mastery of brushstrokes or pirouettes that will help students become better readers and mathematicians; it’s the confidence they gain through experimentation and play that lets them know they can succeed.

However, schools are facing hard financial times and many are required to cut programs, and the first classes to go are often art classes. A recent report from the U.S. Department of Education found that fewer public elementary schools are offering visual arts, dance, and drama classes than they were 10 years ago, which is believed to be due to an increase in programs aimed at improving math and reading scores. It’s not a surprise that student populations that qualify for free or reduced lunch — and benefit most from arts programs — are getting hit the hardest.

Student success starts early. The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading has the mission to close the achievement gap by having all low-income students reading at grade-level by third grade. What would happen if more initiatives were focused on giving students the tools to succeed throughout their development, instead of focusing all their efforts on reversing damage already done? We can’t afford to wait until high school to expose at-risk students to the arts, sports, or community participation that exposes them to the real-world and that might give them the first taste of intrinsic motivation.

LifeBound offers books and curricula that follow a stairstep developmental path for students in fifth through twelfth grade that teach social, emotional, and academic skills for success in school, career, and life. We are also passionate about closing the achievement gap and believe a summer reading program can make a world of difference in the lives of at-risk and impoverished students. Ask us about our book donation program for summer reading in the comments or email us at contact@lifebound.com.

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Sources:

“Arts Involvement Narrows Student Achievement Gap,” by Tom Jacobs. 29 March 2012. Miller-McClune. Accessed on 3 April 2012.  http://www.miller-mccune.com/education/arts-involvement-narrows-student-achievement-gap-40745/

“Report: Fewer Elementary Schools Offering Visual Arts, Drama, Dance; Poor Students Hurt Most,” by Christine Armario. 2 April 2012. Star Tribune. Accessed on 3 April 2012. http://www.startribune.com/nation/145804075.html

“Obamacare.” Trayvon Martin. Facebook privacy lawsuits. Your students are probably familiar with the names and phrases born of our current events, but have they been given the opportunity to discuss them? Do they have questions about what “Obamacare” is? Or, do they already have an opinion?

This election year poses a great opportunity to get students engaged in civics education. You can choose to talk about the general mechanics of an election, or you can steer the discussion on to other current events, whether seemingly of a political nature or not. After all, in an election year, you can bet the candidates will make a headlining story political if the voters have an emotional investment in it. Consider using the following articles and exercises to spark discussions in your class.

• U.S. Health Care:  What is the issue at the center of the health care debate? Who is challenging the law and why? Why is it important (or is it?) that students who aren’t of voting age understand the role of the Supreme Court? These questions and more are answered in the lesson “Before the Law: Understanding the Supreme Court Case on the Affordable Care Act” by The Learning Network (a New York Times education resource).
• The Trayvon Martin Case: No doubt your older students have heard of this case. Are their parents worrying about their safety or behavior? Does this case make them worry about their own safety? Will how a presidential candidate approaches this subject possibly have an influence on their candidacy?  If you need help guiding your discussion, The Learning Network also recently published a guest post by teenager Anthony Turner on being a black male, in response to the Trayvon Martin case, which raises some very potent questions for students.
• Technology Rights and Privacy. Recently, some colleges and employers have been asking applicants for their Facebook passwords so they can read their private messages and see their private pictures. Do your students think their privacy rights should cover social media? Do they think there should be a law against colleges and employers asking for their private passwords? Would they get the job if an employer asked to see their private account? You can read more about the coverage in MSNBC’s article “Facebook Password, Needed for a Job Interview?” Also, you can have your class listen to a Talk of the Nation interview, “Employment Background Checks: How Far Is Too Far?” with a writer from Wired magazine and an employer on Facebook privacy and employment.

You can also use this election year as an opportunity to discuss what the candidates aren’t saying. What issues do students think are important? The majority of their generation has a physical and a digital identity to protect. Do they fear the government doesn’t value their digital privacy as much as they should? What events and issues are most important to your students?

Sources:

“Before the Law: Understanding the Supreme Court Case on the Affordable Care Act” by Sarah Kavanagh and Holly Epstein Ojalvo. 27 March 2012. The Learning Network. Accessed on 28 March 2012. http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/before-the-law-understanding-the-supreme-court-case-on-the-affordable-care-act/

“Employment Background Checks: How Far Is Too Far?” 28 March 2012. NPR. Accessed on 28 March 2012. http://www.npr.org/2012/03/28/149545922/-employers-and-background-checks-how-far-is-too-far

“Facebook Password, Needed for a Job Interview?” 20 March 2012. MSNBC. Accessed on 28 March 2012. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46802166/ns/local_news-fargo_nd/t/facebook-password-needed-job-interview/#.T3OSlexWoys

“On Trayvon Martin: A Guest Post From a Teenager, and Some Teaching Suggestions,” by Katherine Schulten. 26 March 2012. The Learning Network. Accessed on 28 March 2012. http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/on-trayvon-martin-a-guest-post-from-a-teenager-and-some-teaching-suggestions/

The economy has done more than take away jobs. It’s forced families from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds to be homeless, hungry, and lose the comfort of  having other basic needs. Nearly three-quarters of all U.S. households with income below the federal poverty line spend over 50 percent of monthly household income on rent (Endhomelessness.org.)

We are often reminded of the number of Americans losing jobs, or graduating into a bad economy, or taking low-level, minimum wage jobs just to get by. However, what about the students in these families? We also hear a lot about poor student performance on standardized tests, college grads who graduate without critical skills, decreases in school budgets, and the lack of student proficiency in literacy and STEM subjects. We’ve known for decades that students don’t do well if they are hungry, sleep-deprived, or stressed. As more families hit the poverty line, is it any wonder that more students aren’t successful?

“The results are plain to see,” writes Mark Naison in his article “America’s Teachers See Growing Poverty Up Close.” “After ten years of No Child Left Behind, three years of Race to the Top, and twenty years of Teach for America, we have seen no change in the global standing of America’s schools and no reduction in the test score gap between racially and economically disadvantaged groups and the rest of the population.”  Teachers on the frontline of teaching kids in “generational poverty” or those “made newly poor by the economic crisis” are an untapped resource in finding an answer to education reform.

Naison illustrates the picture that many educators see in today’s schools, a perspective he believes many “education reformers” don’t have:

• Many students who live in poor and working class neighborhoods don’t have a secure place to stay, moving from apartment to apartment, experience bouts of homelessness, and move in and out of foster care.
• Students may disappear from school for days or weeks at a time, sometimes not returning altogether.
• Those who attend class often fall asleep in class from sleep deprivation due to crowded homes and homelessness.
• Many students go hungry, and fear the weekend when they don’t get school meals.
• Many live without healthcare.

As many questions about education reform remain unanswered, consider what you can do to give legislators the perspective of a teacher. Is there more you can do to illustrate the struggles and achievements of your students? What would you do to solve the problem of poverty in the classroom? What can you do with your resources to make a difference in a child’s life? How can you use academic coaching to coach a child who is having a hard time at home and in school?

 

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Source:

“America’s Teachers See Growing Poverty Up Close,” By Mark Naison. 17 January 2012. Beyond Chron. Accessed on 18 January 2012. http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=9812#more

The Lumina Foundation, which plays a key role in education nationally, is concerned about “initiative fatigue,” and will concentrate its efforts on getting more students to graduate from college. As someone who has spent the last sixteen years writing books for college students and working with professors to be more effective with freshmen, here is my advice:

1) Start students early on self-awareness. Many colleges wait until the first semester of freshmen year to help students with student success courses or remediation for math and English. These classes need to be taken the summer before freshmen year so that students can have the time to shore up their weaknesses, reflect on their goals, and hit the ground running by the time school starts in the fall.

2) Require that each college partner with feeder K-12 districts. There is not enough preparation academically, emotionally, and socially before students enter college. If colleges play a leadership role with their feeder K-12 districts, they can have a direct impact on what enters their gates instead of passively waiting to inherit woefully under-prepared students that tax the resources and people at the university level.

3) Require students to have at least two internships and make this clear freshmen year. Students without skills can’t get jobs in this economy or even in better economic times. Internships are arguably more important than any class they might take in college. Let’s
not keep this a secret.

4) Have grade level mentors for each student. Students need individual attention from older students who are role models for them. Colleges need to set up peer mentoring so that students can learn how to connect, ask questions and observe someone who has and is currently making good choices. They can aspire to being a leader and a role model themselves as they progress through college.

If the Lumina Foundation works intently with colleges to make these kinds of changes, the graduation rates will improve greatly. Visit www.lifebound.com or email contact@lifebound.com to learn more about LifeBound’s goals, books and programs.

Article:

Lumina Foundation Will Shift Away From New Projects, State Leaders Are Told

BY: ERIC KELDERMAN

Published: July 14, 2010

The Lumina Foundation for Education has become one of the best-known higher-education philanthropies in the country, spending nearly $50-million annually on projects to improve college completion, but now the foundation is worried about “initiative fatigue,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, the group’s president, in remarks here on Wednesday.

To read the full article:www.chronicle.com

While our nation is at-risk for financial and real-estate debacles, we are also at-risk for our economy of the future in underprepared college graduates who are swelling our Higher Educational institutions in numbers two-thirds strong in community colleges and almost one-third strong in four year schools as the article below indicates.

So, what must change at the middle school and high school levels to turn around this disturbing trend, which has grave implications for our workforce of the future? Here are my suggestions:

1) Required homework for high school students. Many of the high school students with whom I work are proud of the fact that they can pass all of their courses without studying at night. How will our reading, writing and math scores improve if we rely on class-time only? American
students should be studying at least three hours a night to become college ready.

2) Training in question-based teaching for students. Many students who aren’t learning at the middle school and high school levels are bored. We need to train teachers–especially high school teachers–in question-based teaching which can produce a dynamic, interactive classroom.

3) Districts have to work together. Schools have to get out of their own individual silos of “elementary,” “middle” and “high school” and think about what skills and bars are needed for students to successfully progress in all skill and learning areas. Without this, there is no way for
measurements and standards to be analyzed over time.

4) Colleges have to work more closely with districts. Without colleges in clear communication to their feeder districts, school administrators won’t know what deficits appear in their graduates once they get to college. An open and close communication will help close this gap.

You don’t need a masters in mathematics to realize that 1.5 million college students remediated for English and 2.5 million remediated for math doesn’t create a strong economic outlook, especially in times of uncertainty such as these where American giants like General Motors are under siege. It is time to change our patterns.

ARTICLE
Chronicle of Higher Education
by By KEVIN CAREY

The man who ranges in No Man’s Land

Is dogged by the shadows on either hand.
— James H. Knight-Adkin, 1917

Remediation is the no man’s land of American education. Every year we send hundreds of thousands of young men and women over the top, across a rocky landscape strewn with pedagogical barbed wire and the remains of those who tried and failed before them. We know, without a doubt, that many of those eager and unsuspecting students won’t make it. Yet we send them anyway, because there’s always another fresh class of recruits to enroll.

To view the entire article visit
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=5kMWzzMmfyszsZfbZqcTdktDwPtgkyfg

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