GUEST COMMENTARY

Initial Teacher Education is Not That Important

BEN LEVIN, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Education Leadership and Policy. University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)

Over the entire 30 plus years of my career in education people have been talking about the importance of reforming initial teacher education.  But my experience, both as a researcher and a senior official, has led me to the opposite conclusion; while better teacher education may be needed, it should be a low item on the education reform priority list, not a high priority.

I say this for two reasons.

First, changing schools through improving initial teacher education is a low impact strategy.  It will take way too long to have any effect.  Even if 10% of all teachers turn over each year, it would take many years (because much of the turnover is among new teachers) to reshape the teaching force. READ MORE...

Children who attend home-based day-care programs are watching twice as much television per day as was previously thought, according to a study released online Monday and published in the December issue of Pediatrics. In a survey of 168 child-care programs in four states, researchers found that toddlers, ages 1 to 3, in home-based day-care centers watched an average of 1.6 hours of television there each day, including videos and DVDs. Preschool-age children, 3 to 5 years old, watched 2.4 hours a day in home-based centers. Prior studies have estimated that preschool-age children watch one to three hours of television a day. But those relied on reports from parents about children's habits at home and did not count the time they spent in front of the television during day care, underestimating the total TV time by up to 100 percent, researchers said.
Source: Pediatrics

Obama Pushes Math, Science Education
CNN
On Monday, Obama said that the U.S. needs to restore the nation’s leadership in educating children in math and science to meet future challenges. He also introduced The Educate to Innovate Campaign that will bring teachers, parents, and businesses together to promote math and science learning. So far, the campaign has been committed $260M from corporations including Xerox, Kodak, Time Warner Cable, and Intel.

Audit: Civic Education Group Misused $5.9M
Matt Kelley, USA Today
A non-profit California-based group, the Center for Civic Education, that gets millions of dollars a year from Congress to help teach students about government failed to justify more than $5.9 million last year. The inspector general's report says the center couldn't properly account for $3.2 million in employee salaries. The report also says the center's monthly time sheets were unreliable because most of the employees interviewed said they estimated the time spent on each project rather than log what they worked.

The Playtime's the Thing
Emma Brown, Washington Post
The debate among early childhood educators over whether precious school hours should be spent on play has simmered for years. But it is intensifying as preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, once the province of child-care centers, is increasingly embraced by public school systems to teach students the skills they need to be successful in kindergarten. That is especially true for poor and minority children and those who speak English as a second language.

106 Backpacks for the Children of Moberly
Bob Greene, CNN
Every Friday afternoon, the backpacks are placed carefully on the floors of the hallways in the elementary schools of Moberly, Missouri. There are 106 of them: 106 backpacks, each of them with no child's name and with no individual owner. The backpacks -- property of the school -- are filled with food. The idea is that, when those 106 children leave class on Friday afternoons, they will pick up the backpacks, sling them over their shoulders and casually walk out of the school with their classmates. The idea is that the children who need the food -- they range in age from kindergartners to fifth-graders -- will blend in with the hundreds of other boys and girls who get enough to eat at home and that the 106 children will feel no stigma.

Stimulus Rules on 'Turnarounds' Shift
Lesli A. Maxwell, Education Week
The final rules for the $4 billion Race to the Top competition give states and districts more leeway in how they intervene in chronically underperforming schools, a subtle but important change that raises new questions about whether the push to turn around struggling campuses will succeed in rehabilitating large numbers of schools. School turnaround plans are worth up to 50 points, out of a total of 500.

Lawmakers in High-Minority Areas Send Few to Academies
USA Today
A review of records from the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy show that lawmakers from heavily minority areas rank at or near the bottom in number of students nominated for academy appointment. Lawmakers can issue a possible 150 nominations over four years, but the 20 House members with the least nominations were all from districts where whites make up less than a majority. Some district in New York had less than ten nominations in the last four years.

Arizona Union Challenges Law Changes on Teachers
Washington Post
Arizona’s largest teachers union is asking the Supreme Court to rule that recently enacted legislation affecting public school employees is unconstitutional. A special-action lawsuit filed Monday by the Arizona Education Association challenges legislation dealing with such topics as teachers' seniority rights in layoffs and deadlines for school districts to decide whether to renew contracts. The AEA contends the legislation approved last summer was illegal on several grounds. The union says it wasn't included as a topic for a special legislative session called on budget matters.

Texas Higher Education Board Gets $1.8 Million from Lumina Foundation
Holly K. Hacker, Dallas Morning News
As part of a $9.1 million effort in seven states to make universities more efficient and award more diplomas, The Lumina Foundation has announced a $1.8M grant to Texas’ public universities. Texas education officials say they'll also use the grant to make it easier for students to transfer from two-year to four-year colleges. This is the latest effort to make Texas public universities more productive and careful with taxpayer dollars.

Group Gives Bad Grade to Teacher Education
Ericka Mellon, Houston Chronicle
The National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit research and advocacy group in Washington, D.C., has graded each of the 67 college-based teacher training programs in Texas. The council declined to release its findings about specific schools until the report is finalized. But Kate Walsh, the council’s president, said the initial research shows that the teacher-training programs, on average, lack adequate math instruction for aspiring elementary school teachers, and some colleges water down courses for aspiring high school teachers.

College Requires Heavy Students to Take Fitness Class to Graduate
USA Today
In Philadelphia, historically black Lincoln University has mandated that obese undergraduate students complete a “Fitness for Life” course, which meets three hours a week, to receive their degree. Lincoln requires students get tested for their Body Mass Index (BMI), a measure of weight to height with a normal range between 18.5 and 24.9, and any students weighing in at 30 or above are required to take the course and complete it to graduate.

Trainee Teacher Targets Exceeded
BBC News
The number of people joining teacher training courses in England this year exceeded government targets for the first time. The Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) said it met or exceeded recruitment targets in every area. This year trainee math teachers came in 8% above the target. The TDA's rule of thumb is that even if it recruited every single university math graduate in any given year, it would not have enough trainee teachers. So this increase is particularly significant.

Afghan Schools Seek Survival Amid Attacks
Moni Basu, CNN
In Afghanistan, between January 2006 and December 2008, 1,153 education-related attacks or threats were reported, according to CARE, a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty. Even though only 20 percent of Afghanistan’s schools are for girls, these institutions suffer 40 percent of these attacks. Now, the World Bank is partnering with CARE to investigate how education can succeed amid increasing violent attacks on Afghan schools.

Report Finds Educated Immigrants Are Underemployed
The Gazette (Montreal)
Two-thirds of university-educated recent immigrants to Canada are underemployed in jobs requiring at most a college education or apprenticeship, according to a Statistics Canada report released Monday. The report found that average weekly wages were $23.72 an hour for Canadian-born in the core working age group of 25 to 54, according to the report, $2.28 an hour more than that of immigrant workers. The wage gap was larger - about $5 per hour - among those who had arrived within the last five years and between immigrants and Canadian-born workers with university degrees.

Cash Crisis University Criticized
BBC News
London Metropolitan University (LMU) was ordered to repay £36.5m after issuing false data on student numbers. The problem arose because the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE ) only provides universities with money for a student who sits all their exams at the end of the year. LMU admitted it counted students as having completed the period if they moved into the next year, regardless of whether they had sat all exams. Under the LMU's definition, just 3% of students failed to complete the year. Under the real definition the non-completion rate was 30%.

Australia 'Regressive' on Indigenous Education
 ABC News- Australia
A national conference has heard how the education system in Australia is failing Indigenous children and forcing many to drop out with little or no skills. More than 600 delegates are attending the fifth National Indigenous Education Conference in Hobart. Teachers, students, policy makers and members of Aboriginal communities and organizations have come together to discuss an unacceptable standard of learning and training for Indigenous people. International expert Lorna Williams says the problem stems from schools ignoring Aboriginal history in the classroom and not helping Indigenous students enough. The three-day conference aims to discuss where changes can be made and how.

State of the States in Gifted Education
The State of the States is a biannual report produced by the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) and the Council of State Directors of Programs for the Gifted (CSDPG). Forty-seven states completed the survey.  The resulting picture shows a patchwork of gifted services, little teacher training in recognizing or serving gifted children, modest funding, and a lack of accountability for educating high-ability learners.  Gifted education supporters can use the data in State of the States to compare their states with others in the region and country to advocate for stronger gifted policies in their state. 

American Youth Policy Forum: Programs Support Youth on Path to College
The American Youth Policy Forum’s latest report, Success at Every Step: How 23 Programs Support Youth on the Path to College and Beyond, takes a look at efforts that have proven effective in helping students complete high school and prepare for success in college and the workforce. The report identifies “Ten Elements of Success” common to each of the programs studied. These elements include rigor and academic support, college knowledge and access, effective instruction, strategic use of time, cross-system collaboration, and effective assessment and use of data. The report also makes several policy recommendations, including developing comprehensive and coordinated plans that ensure a continuum of support services from middle school through four years of college, supporting collaboration among different providers to allow greater flexibility in funding, placing a value on not only academic skills, but a full range of knowledge, skills, and resources necessary for career success.