Sunday, May 18, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
article on violence in the Times Magazine this weekend
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/magazine/04health-t.html?ref=magazine
An interesting look at gang violence by epistimologist. Is gang violence a disease and how can we look to cure it?
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
a true sisyphisian task
The following Times article on public education in India left me feeling pretty deflated....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/world/asia/17india.html?hp
Sunday, January 13, 2008
ny times article on home school supervision
Lack of Supervision Noted in Deaths of Home-Schooled
By JANE GROSS
Ten states and the District of Columbia, where Banita M. Jacks was charged on Thursday with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her four daughters, have no regulations regarding home schooling, not even the requirement that families notify the authorities that they are educating their children at home.
The lack of supervision of the home-schooling process, some experts say, may have made it easier last year for Ms. Jacks to withdraw her children from school and the prying eyes of teachers, social workers and other professionals who otherwise might have detected signs of abuse and neglect of the girls.
Instead, the children, ages 5 to 17, slipped through the cracks in multiple systems, including social services, education and law enforcement. Their decomposed bodies were discovered earlier this week by United States marshals serving eviction papers on the troubled family.
The absence of any home-schooling regulations in Washington is largely the result of advocacy and litigation by the Home School Legal Defense Association, which since its founding in 1983 has transformed the landscape for families home schooling their children. Once against the law in all but five states, home schooling is now legal throughout the country and highly regulated in just six states, New York among them. About 1.1 million of the 50 million school age children were home schooled in 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics says.
For sure, the fact that Ms. Jacks�s children last attended school in March in no way accounts for their deaths, which the medical examiner said occurred more than two weeks ago. There was evidence that the eldest girl had been stabbed and that the others had signs of strangulation and other trauma. Ms. Jacks denies responsibility, saying the children died in their sleep and were possessed by demons.
Officials at the Home School Legal Defense Association, in Purcellville, Va., acknowledge that children schooled at home, as Ms. Jacks said hers were, are in rare instances the victims of abuse. But such cases generally occur in families already known to law enforcement or social service agencies who may have �missed the signs and signals,� said Ian M. Slatter, a spokesman for the association, and �being in school wouldn�t all of a sudden make those children safe.�
That view is disputed by other experts.
Clive R. Belfield, a professor of economics at Queens College and formerly a researcher at the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia Teachers College, said that �limited compliance and follow-up� gave abusive families �an excuse to get out of being observed.�
Mitchell L. Stevens, an associate professor of education and sociology at New York University, said school officials, who are required by law to report suspicion of child abuse, were society�s best watchdogs of how parents treat children.
�Home schooling removes children from a lot of that surveillance,� Mr. Stevens said, adding that the vast majority of home schooling families are �overwhelmingly trustworthy people who place a very high value on parental autonomy.� And thanks to the advocacy of the legal defense fund, he continued, �they have been largely successful since the late 1980s in getting the law to favor parental rights.�
One example of that, in 1991, disrupted an effort by the District of Columbia to regulate home schooling, with rules that included unannounced home visits and required teachers certification for parents doing the instruction. Christopher Klicka, senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association, met with District officials, told them they were on shaky ground because of the 1st, 4th and 14th amendments, and the rules were rescinded.
Mr. Klicka said he had also intervened to overturn requirements for home visits in a number of other states, including South Dakota, Rhode Island, Illinois and Massachusetts. At one time, he said, 20 states had such a requirement; now none do. Mr. Klicka added that the only regulation he found �reasonable� was that families notify authorities of their plans to home school. Other requirements, including record-keeping on childrens� progress and either standardized testing or year-end portfolios to demonstrate competence, all required in New York State, were currently being challenged in eight active court cases nationally.
Washington still has no formal regulations, according to spokesmen for both the mayor and the public school system, although parents are supposed to file an �intent to withdraw from school� form with the district, something that did not happen in the Jacks case, although school social workers made several attempts to visit the family and reported the childrens� absence from school to authorities.
Among his plans, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty of Washington promised �to establish better tracking and monitoring of home school families.�
By JANE GROSS
Ten states and the District of Columbia, where Banita M. Jacks was charged on Thursday with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her four daughters, have no regulations regarding home schooling, not even the requirement that families notify the authorities that they are educating their children at home.
The lack of supervision of the home-schooling process, some experts say, may have made it easier last year for Ms. Jacks to withdraw her children from school and the prying eyes of teachers, social workers and other professionals who otherwise might have detected signs of abuse and neglect of the girls.
Instead, the children, ages 5 to 17, slipped through the cracks in multiple systems, including social services, education and law enforcement. Their decomposed bodies were discovered earlier this week by United States marshals serving eviction papers on the troubled family.
The absence of any home-schooling regulations in Washington is largely the result of advocacy and litigation by the Home School Legal Defense Association, which since its founding in 1983 has transformed the landscape for families home schooling their children. Once against the law in all but five states, home schooling is now legal throughout the country and highly regulated in just six states, New York among them. About 1.1 million of the 50 million school age children were home schooled in 2003, the National Center for Education Statistics says.
For sure, the fact that Ms. Jacks�s children last attended school in March in no way accounts for their deaths, which the medical examiner said occurred more than two weeks ago. There was evidence that the eldest girl had been stabbed and that the others had signs of strangulation and other trauma. Ms. Jacks denies responsibility, saying the children died in their sleep and were possessed by demons.
Officials at the Home School Legal Defense Association, in Purcellville, Va., acknowledge that children schooled at home, as Ms. Jacks said hers were, are in rare instances the victims of abuse. But such cases generally occur in families already known to law enforcement or social service agencies who may have �missed the signs and signals,� said Ian M. Slatter, a spokesman for the association, and �being in school wouldn�t all of a sudden make those children safe.�
That view is disputed by other experts.
Clive R. Belfield, a professor of economics at Queens College and formerly a researcher at the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia Teachers College, said that �limited compliance and follow-up� gave abusive families �an excuse to get out of being observed.�
Mitchell L. Stevens, an associate professor of education and sociology at New York University, said school officials, who are required by law to report suspicion of child abuse, were society�s best watchdogs of how parents treat children.
�Home schooling removes children from a lot of that surveillance,� Mr. Stevens said, adding that the vast majority of home schooling families are �overwhelmingly trustworthy people who place a very high value on parental autonomy.� And thanks to the advocacy of the legal defense fund, he continued, �they have been largely successful since the late 1980s in getting the law to favor parental rights.�
One example of that, in 1991, disrupted an effort by the District of Columbia to regulate home schooling, with rules that included unannounced home visits and required teachers certification for parents doing the instruction. Christopher Klicka, senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association, met with District officials, told them they were on shaky ground because of the 1st, 4th and 14th amendments, and the rules were rescinded.
Mr. Klicka said he had also intervened to overturn requirements for home visits in a number of other states, including South Dakota, Rhode Island, Illinois and Massachusetts. At one time, he said, 20 states had such a requirement; now none do. Mr. Klicka added that the only regulation he found �reasonable� was that families notify authorities of their plans to home school. Other requirements, including record-keeping on childrens� progress and either standardized testing or year-end portfolios to demonstrate competence, all required in New York State, were currently being challenged in eight active court cases nationally.
Washington still has no formal regulations, according to spokesmen for both the mayor and the public school system, although parents are supposed to file an �intent to withdraw from school� form with the district, something that did not happen in the Jacks case, although school social workers made several attempts to visit the family and reported the childrens� absence from school to authorities.
Among his plans, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty of Washington promised �to establish better tracking and monitoring of home school families.�
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
reading ups test scores....duh!
Did anyone see this article in the Times?
From The New York Times
November 19, 2007
Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading
By MOTOKO RICH
Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside,
Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less
for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining.
At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math
and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited,
and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.
That is the message of a new report being released today by the
National Endowment for the Arts, based on an analysis of data from
about two dozen studies from the federal Education and Labor
Departments and the Census Bureau as well as other academic,
foundation and business surveys. After its 2004 report, “Reading at
Risk,” which found that fewer than half of Americans over 18 read
novels, short stories, plays or poetry, the endowment sought to
collect more comprehensive data to build a picture of the role of all
reading, including nonfiction.
In his preface to the new 99-page report Dana Gioia, chairman of the
endowment, described the data as “simple, consistent and alarming.”
Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary
school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle
school students and slightly declining among high school seniors.
These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading
among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a
drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also
showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed
better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or
hardly at all.
The study also examined results from reading tests administered to
adults and found a similar trend: The percentage of adults who are
proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the
proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.
Three years ago “Reading at Risk,” which was based on a study by the
Census Bureau in 2002, provoked a debate among academics, publishers
and others, some of whom argued that the report defined reading too
narrowly by focusing on fiction, poetry and drama. Others argued that
there had not been as much of a decline in reading as the report
suggested.
This time the endowment did not limit its analysis to so-called
literary reading. It selected studies that asked questions about
“reading for fun” or “time spent reading for pleasure,” saying that
this could refer to a range of reading materials.
“It’s no longer reasonable to debate whether the problem exists,” said
Sunil Iyengar, director of research and analysis for the endowment.
“Let’s not nitpick or wrangle over to what extent is reading in
decline.”
In an interview Mr. Gioia said that the statistics could not explain
why reading had declined, but he pointed to several commonly accepted
culprits, including the proliferation of digital diversions on the
Internet and other gadgets, and the failure of schools and colleges to
develop a culture of daily reading habits. In addition, Mr. Gioia
said, “we live in a society where the media does not recognize,
celebrate or discuss reading, literature and authors.”
In seeking to detail the consequences of a decline in reading, the
study showed that reading appeared to correlate with other academic
achievement. In examining the average 2005 math scores of 12th graders
who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books, an analysis of federal
Education Department statistics found that those students scored much
lower than those who lived in homes with more than 100 books. Although
some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar
noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but
whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests
than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were
therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with
fewer than 10 books.
The new report also looked at data from the workplace, including a
survey that showed nearly three-quarters of employers who were polled
rated “reading comprehension” as “very important” for workers with two-
year college degrees, and nearly 90 percent of employers said so for
graduates of four-year colleges. Better reading skills were also
correlated with higher income.
In an analysis of Education Department statistics looking at eight
weekly income brackets, the data showed that 7 percent of full-time
workers who scored at levels deemed “below basic” on reading tests
earned $850 to $1,149 a week, the fourth-highest income bracket, while
20 percent of workers who had scored at reading levels deemed
“proficient” earned such wages.
The new report is likely to provoke as much debate as the previous
one. Stephen Krashen, a professor emeritus of education at the
University of Southern California, said that based on his analysis of
other data, reading was not on the decline. He added that the
endowment appeared to be exaggerating the decline in reading scores
and said that according to federal education statistics, the bulk of
decreases in 12th-grade reading scores had occurred in the early
1990s, and that compared with 1994 average reading scores in 2005 were
only one point lower.
Timothy Shanahan, past president of the International Reading
Association and a professor of urban education and reading at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested that the endowment’s
report was not nuanced enough. “I don’t disagree with the N.E.A.’s
notion that reading is important, but I’m not as quick to discount the
reading that I think young people are really doing,” he said,
referring to reading on the Internet. He added, “I don’t think the
solutions are as simple as a report like this might be encouraging
folks to think they might be.”
From The New York Times
November 19, 2007
Study Links Drop in Test Scores to a Decline in Time Spent Reading
By MOTOKO RICH
Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside,
Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less
for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining.
At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math
and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited,
and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.
That is the message of a new report being released today by the
National Endowment for the Arts, based on an analysis of data from
about two dozen studies from the federal Education and Labor
Departments and the Census Bureau as well as other academic,
foundation and business surveys. After its 2004 report, “Reading at
Risk,” which found that fewer than half of Americans over 18 read
novels, short stories, plays or poetry, the endowment sought to
collect more comprehensive data to build a picture of the role of all
reading, including nonfiction.
In his preface to the new 99-page report Dana Gioia, chairman of the
endowment, described the data as “simple, consistent and alarming.”
Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary
school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle
school students and slightly declining among high school seniors.
These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading
among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a
drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also
showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed
better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or
hardly at all.
The study also examined results from reading tests administered to
adults and found a similar trend: The percentage of adults who are
proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the
proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.
Three years ago “Reading at Risk,” which was based on a study by the
Census Bureau in 2002, provoked a debate among academics, publishers
and others, some of whom argued that the report defined reading too
narrowly by focusing on fiction, poetry and drama. Others argued that
there had not been as much of a decline in reading as the report
suggested.
This time the endowment did not limit its analysis to so-called
literary reading. It selected studies that asked questions about
“reading for fun” or “time spent reading for pleasure,” saying that
this could refer to a range of reading materials.
“It’s no longer reasonable to debate whether the problem exists,” said
Sunil Iyengar, director of research and analysis for the endowment.
“Let’s not nitpick or wrangle over to what extent is reading in
decline.”
In an interview Mr. Gioia said that the statistics could not explain
why reading had declined, but he pointed to several commonly accepted
culprits, including the proliferation of digital diversions on the
Internet and other gadgets, and the failure of schools and colleges to
develop a culture of daily reading habits. In addition, Mr. Gioia
said, “we live in a society where the media does not recognize,
celebrate or discuss reading, literature and authors.”
In seeking to detail the consequences of a decline in reading, the
study showed that reading appeared to correlate with other academic
achievement. In examining the average 2005 math scores of 12th graders
who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books, an analysis of federal
Education Department statistics found that those students scored much
lower than those who lived in homes with more than 100 books. Although
some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar
noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but
whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests
than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were
therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with
fewer than 10 books.
The new report also looked at data from the workplace, including a
survey that showed nearly three-quarters of employers who were polled
rated “reading comprehension” as “very important” for workers with two-
year college degrees, and nearly 90 percent of employers said so for
graduates of four-year colleges. Better reading skills were also
correlated with higher income.
In an analysis of Education Department statistics looking at eight
weekly income brackets, the data showed that 7 percent of full-time
workers who scored at levels deemed “below basic” on reading tests
earned $850 to $1,149 a week, the fourth-highest income bracket, while
20 percent of workers who had scored at reading levels deemed
“proficient” earned such wages.
The new report is likely to provoke as much debate as the previous
one. Stephen Krashen, a professor emeritus of education at the
University of Southern California, said that based on his analysis of
other data, reading was not on the decline. He added that the
endowment appeared to be exaggerating the decline in reading scores
and said that according to federal education statistics, the bulk of
decreases in 12th-grade reading scores had occurred in the early
1990s, and that compared with 1994 average reading scores in 2005 were
only one point lower.
Timothy Shanahan, past president of the International Reading
Association and a professor of urban education and reading at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested that the endowment’s
report was not nuanced enough. “I don’t disagree with the N.E.A.’s
notion that reading is important, but I’m not as quick to discount the
reading that I think young people are really doing,” he said,
referring to reading on the Internet. He added, “I don’t think the
solutions are as simple as a report like this might be encouraging
folks to think they might be.”
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