In his annual address to secondary school heads, John Dunford, the general secretary of the U.K.’s Association Of School and College Leaders, acknowledged yesterday that a culture of instant gratification has made the job of teaching today’s youth harder than its ever been.

“Success appears to come instantly and without any real effort,” Dunford told the conference audience. “It is difficult for teachers to compete. Success in learning just doesn’t come fast enough.” 

Well said, Mr. Dunford, but hardly revolutionary.

For years now, I’ve heard from teacher friends and seen from site visits how much teaching has become by necessity almost entertainment like; we must engage the students by making lessons fun and relevant.

One teacher told me recently that she has to convince high school students that learning basic math concepts like multiplication and  division are necessarily skills in life, even employing popular rap stars and their lyrics about money making within her arsenal.

That’s sad … but is it inevitable given how prolific and accessible technology and media are and make everything seem? Not only do we have 24/7 media, we have an endless supply of fame-seekers willing to broadcast their lives 24/7.
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Photo courtesy Gates Foundation

Want to hold onto your best teachers? Put good principals in your schools.

For years, teachers have been telling me that a good principal—someone who is supportive, focuses on improving instruction, and creates a healthy school climate—is the single most important factor in their choice of schools to work in.

Now a national survey of 40,000 teachers confirms my anecdotal-based opinion.

The survey, sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, found that 68 percent of teachers said  “supportive leadership” is essential for retaining good teachers, as opposed to only 45 percent who rated higher salaries as important.

That comes as no surprise to me. Without a good principal or an enlightened central office, a school can become a lousy place to work. No teacher is going to sit in a classroom every day if the principal won’t intervene against student misbehavior in hallways or classrooms—or can’t inspire a sense of meaning and progress to the work teachers do.

Conducted in conjunction with Scholastic Inc., the survey findings, Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools, offers some other insights into the minds of teachers:
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Photo courtesy Stockvault

Back in the Stone Age, when journalists used something called a typewriter, I was always pleased when my editors asked me to write about a newly released “report” on education.

I thought it was easy work: All I had to do was pull information from the two-page summary and press release that accompanied the report—and perhaps call some “expert” for a quote.

But now I’m older—and, I hope, a little wiser.

Earlier this week, I came across a British study that purportedly blamed schools for dooming young boys to a lifetime of “crime, drugs, and prison.” Schools, summarized a story in the Tele-graph, were failing to properly educate poor young boys, leaving them to become “misfits and criminals” when they grew up.

My initial reaction was, “Aha! A report that says schools are to blame for society’s woes. That sounds like politically inspired nonsense. Perhaps here’s an opportunity to write about bad research with exaggerated, ideologically based biases.”

A bit of a knee-jerk reaction, I admit. But my impression was reinforced by other media accounts, as well as some of the publicity material produced by the Centre for Policy Studies, the London-based think tank that released the report, Wasted: The Betrayal of White Working Class and Black Caribbean Boys.
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There’s one bright spot in this ongoing recession, and we’re not talking about the Dow breaking 10,200.  A new report from the advocacy group Pre [k] now says that, despite severe budget shortfalls, states have increased pre-k funding by more than $64 million.

“In light of the tough fiscal environment, the news for young children is surprisingly good,” writes Susan K. Urahn, managing director of The Pew Center on the States, Pre [k] now’s parent organization, in a letter accompanying the report.

Fifteen states increased pre-K  funding, and nine others and the District of Columbia expect spending increases through school funding formulas, the report says. Texas, which has a school funding formula, also saw a legislative increase.  Funding remained the same for six states. And just 10 state legislatures cut pre-K spending. (One state’s budget not completed in time for the report.)

Despite this relatively good news, the report criticizes states like Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois for cutting preschool funding. Those decisions “will cost thousands of young children the opportunity to enter kindergarten better prepared,” the report says. “ At the same time, rising unemployment and declining economic security mean families are even more in need of publically funded programs like quality early learning.”

The national economic picture might be slowly improving, but state budgets “are projected to get worse before they get better,” the report says. In such a climate, it might be easier, politically, to cut funding for poor children, who don’t vote and can’t match the lobbying power of wealthier and well-placed interest groups.  But to do so would hurt our nation’s long-term economic health and prevent thousands of disadvantaged children from reaching their potential.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

Photo courtesy of Stockvault

We’re all feeling more financial stress these days—whether it’s loss of a job or other income, mounting bills and floundering home prices, or just seeing other family and friends deal with the economic downturn. It’s no surprise that our stress is rubbing off on our kids–and psychologists and pediatricians are warning that can have significant consequences.

New results from an annual survey by the American Psychological Association—appropriately called “Stress in America”–show that kids “absolutely” feel their parents’ stress, and parents don’t always know that their children are picking up on it.

The APA reports that teenagers and tweens (children ages 8-12) were more likely than parents to say that their stress had increased in the last year.

Forty-five percent of teens ages 13-17 said that they worried more this year, but not all of their parents were aware of that, as only 28 percent of parents reported that their teen’s stress increased, according to the survey.

A quarter, 26 percent, of tweens said they worried more this year, but only 17 percent of parents believed their tween’s stress had increased. And while only 2-5 percent of parents rated their child’s stress as “extreme,” 14 percent of tweens and 28 percent of teens said that they worry a lot or a great deal, the APA reports.
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You’ve heard about the “graying” of America. You’ve likely heard of the “browning” of America.

But have you ever considered what America will be like when it is both brown and gray?

We could be in for a rough ride, James Johnson, director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center at the University of North Carolina, predicted at a conference of NSBA’s Council of Urban Boards of Education (CUBE) in Austin, Texas, last week.

“This country . . . every state, every urban school district is in the midst of an unprecedented demographic transformation,” he said. “Buckle your seatbelts.”

Johnson wasn’t saying a growing minority population—or an aging population—is, in and of itself, a bad thing. But both trends, acting in unison, will have an immense impact on the nation.

And, if policymakers aren’t preparing for what’s to come, the nation will be the worse for it.
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Could the efforts of school boards to remove candy bars and soda pop from school vending machines lead to reduced crime rates in the future?

The answer depends on whether you believe new research coming out of the United Kingdom. There, it seems, children who eat lots of sweets are more likely to grow up to be violent as adults.

So concludes a study of 17,500 adults by Cardiff University, which found that people who ate sweets and chocolate every day as a 10-yer-old were 64 percent more likely “to have a criminal violence conviction by age 34.”

As with any research, educators need to look a little deeper at the findings. Researchers didn’t say that sweets, in and of themselves, are the cause of increased levels of adult violence.
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On occasion, ASBJ has advised school board members to learn more about how research can be used to better understand education issues—and also warned them how research can muddy the waters if used incorrectly.

The editors of ASBJ have had cause to heed their own words lately.

Working on an article on school choice for the November issue, senior editor Naomi Dillon came across a U.S. Department of Education study that concluded, in her words, that “students enrolled in online courses perform at consistently higher levels when compared to traditional classroom settings.”

She also noted a study indicating students at the Florida Virtual School “earned better grades, scored higher on state tests, and outperformed their traditional classroom counterparts on AP courses, too.”

All true enough. But what was the other side of the story? What of studies that found no significant difference in student achievement between online and traditional classroom learning.

Other questions arose. Did the Education Department study determine whether working online was the cause of improved student achievement—or did higher scores simply reflect that more high-achieving students have online opportunities than less-successful students?

And if Florida Virtual School students earn better grades, is that because students who sign up for online courses are more naturally self-motivated? What about students who regularly skip school and never bother with homework? Are they likely to enroll in online classes? Does their absence skew the comparison between online and traditional schools?

Rather than distract readers with a litany of research findings, we simply noted the cited research wasn’t the final word and went on with the main point of the story.
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We held our bullying prevention webinar last week and we had more than a thousand people register (you were there, weren’t you?). That phenomenal response confirms to me that the topic of bullying prevention is on the minds of many educators, administrators, and school board members. 

A decade ago, right after the Columbine shootings, I wrote an article about bullying and what districts were doing to prevent it. I was heartened to discover that the attitude about bullying that I grew up with (it’s natural and adults shouldn’t interfere) was fading.

I revisited the topic in our September issue to see what had changed in the decade after Columbine. A lot, as I found out. The school shooting tragedy has spawned a huge body of research on how bullying affect students and the best ways to do school-based prevention. The people I interviewed said that fewer educators and administrators had to be convinced of the school’s role in prevention.

I mentioned my article to my brother when he visited this summer. He’s in his mid-50s – the age of many administrators and school board members. He asked if schools should be preventing bullying, because it was going to happen anyway. I answered with a resounding yes – school is exactly the place to do this. Schools should be a safe haven for students, and they don’t learn very well when they’re being threatened, shamed, or made fun of.

David Cullen’s excellent book, Columbine, published this year, showed that neither of the two young killers was bullied. It was a myth that took on a life of its own because of our very real need to find a rational explanation for what happened. That doesn’t change the fact that other school shootings had their roots in bullying behavior and that research has shown that bullying brings student achievement down and hurts children long into adulthood.

Read my September article here, where you can also check out my first article. Also, we’re going to post the webinar, in case you missed it.

What do you think? How big of a role should schools play in bullying prevention? Leave a comment and let us know.

Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor

Courtesy of StockVault

Finally, here in Virginia, it’s the first day of school. And if it seems like ages that we parents have waited for this moment, well, we have. By law, schools in the Commonwealth must start after Labor Day, and Labor Day fell on Sept. 7 this year, the latest possible day.

 Last week, as my wife and I were busily preparing our daughters for kindergarten and third grade, I read a review in Teachers College Record of  a book claiming that today’s fretful, hyper-vigilant approach to education and child rearing is doing children more harm than good. It’s by Helene Guldberg, and it’s called Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear.

Thanks, Helene: Now I have something else to worry about.

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