By Dr. Elizabeth V. Primas (Program Manager, NNPA/ESSA Public Awareness Campaign)
I was recently approached by a father of a student from Ann Arundel County, Maryland that was disappointed that his son was unable to attend his neighborhood magnet school; his son met all the requirements to become classified as a magnet student. Upon inquiry, administrators informed the father that the feeder school system did not permit his child to attend the desired school, even though the campus was less than two miles away from their family home. This was especially upsetting to the father, because he purchased the home 10 years ago with that specific school in mind. The school prescribed by the feeder school system is 12 miles away from his home.
Great Schools, the leading national nonprofit organization devoted to assisting parents in unlocking educational opportunities for their children, gives the prescribed feeder school a two out of five stars rating, compared to the four stars given to the school initially selected by the father. Realizing that the school’s ratings may lead to a misguided conclusion, he and his wife toured the school to get a first-hand look. They were equally disappointed with the school climate and physical condition of the building.
His son is a recipient of the President’s Award for Educational Excellence. The administrators were adamant that the prescribed school would meet his son’s educational needs; despite their insistence, the father was never convinced.
After failing to make progress with school administrators in Ann Arundel County, he made the hard decision to enroll his child in a local non-magnet school, which has only one Advanced Placement (AP) course and limited opportunities in advanced courses.
My question to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is this: Why is it that, despite your push for “school choice,” parents are still being directed to lower performing schools with poor school climate, inadequately prepared teachers, and failing test scores?
This is contradictory to the intention of the Every Student Succeeds Act. It is the opposite of the policies you and the Trump Administration say you support. The options offered to this parent were inadequate and did not allow him the opportunity to ensure his child will receive a quality education. Furthermore, the feeder school system, in this instance, was completely ineffective.
Instead of fixing education, it appears this administration has allowed states and local school districts to re-segregate, provide lower quality education to children of color and sentence our children to academic underachievement. This is not how ESSA was designed to operate.
Thankfully, this parent did not accept less for his child. Other parents may not have the ability to stand for their children. ESSA was supposed to provide a high-quality education to all children. Let’s make sure no child is faced with choosing between potential social isolation for a higher quality education or convenience at the expense of academic achievement.
Get involved with education in your community and learn more about the Every Student Succeeds Act at www.nnpa.org/essa.
Dr. Elizabeth Primas is an educator, who spent more than 40 years working towards improving education for children of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds. Dr. Primas is the program manager for the NNPA’s Every Student Succeeds Act Public Awareness Campaign. Follow Dr. Primas on Twitter @ElizabethPrima3.
By Dr. Elizabeth Primas (Program Manager, NNPA/ESSA Public Awareness Campaign)
I am a former teacher. I taught for 25 years in the public school system and have held various titles in the field of education throughout my 40-year career. I have always had a passion for education. My family and I joke that I have been teaching since the first day of kindergarten. My older sister also wanted to be a teacher. So, we would spend our evenings “playing school” with our many siblings and neighbors. Because of our productive “pretend play” I began school already reading and writing. I remember printing the alphabet with pride. By the time I reached third grade I was reading everything I could get my hands on and helping my classmates read as well. In fact, the only time I was reprimanded was when I tried to help a classmate pronounce names during her social studies report on current events.
I shared that time during my childhood, because it is important for educators to understand that children begin school on various levels. Children develop and retain information differently. Some students begin school ahead of the pack. As educators, it is our responsibility to ensure all children, irrespective of their initial academic level continue to make progress.
Unfortunately, most students are not progressing at an appropriate pace. The reauthorized, national education law, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), grants states the freedom to develop their own academic standards and measures of accountability so long as those standards prepare students for college and career readiness. State academic standards can include a wide range of subject areas; in contrast to the previous emphasis on reading and mathematics. To support the academic achievement of students with varied academic ability, background, and socioeconomic status, it is vital that educators refrain from the one-size-fits-all model of instruction promoted during No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
To improve academic achievement, we must reflect on our stated mission: to educate all children. Not every child is going to be a mathematician. Not every child is going to be a scientist or doctor. However, every child is born with specific gifts and talents. It is up to us, as parents and educators, to help each child develop those specific talents. In a family of six children, each of my siblings had a different area of interest. One became a medical doctor, another a mathematician, still another, an engineer; there are two former teachers, and a law enforcement officer. We were all expected to excel in our respective fields, and we did.
Success comes in many forms. A successful student is allowed to pursue his/her natural talents and encouraged to learn the skills needed to be a productive citizen. Had my siblings and I been limited to reading and mathematics, we probably wouldn’t have been as successful; not in our careers or personal lives. To improve academic achievement, let’s first equip teachers with the skills to recognize the natural talents that support and encourage academic achievement. School systems must realize that tests only measure a finite set of skills and that skills do exist outside of those measured. Academic achievement is improved when we recognize the differences in children and embrace them rather than trying to put every child in the same, square box. Academic achievement is improved when parents take the initiative to advocate for their child’s needs from the womb all the way through college graduation and the start of their careers.
Who is responsible for improving academic achievement? All of us. Get engaged, go to the meetings, participate in the professional development, take part in the free webinars, read the articles on education in your local newspapers, and be a voice in your child’s education.
If you are looking for tips on how to get involved, or where to go to attend meetings, visit . www.nnpa.org/essa.
Dr. Elizabeth Primas is an educator, who spent more than 40 years working towards improving education for children of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds. Dr. Primas is the program manager for the NNPA’s Every Student Succeeds Act Public Awareness Campaign. Follow Dr. Primas on Twitter @elizabethprimas.
A recent panel discussion hosted by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, showcased the importance of an education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
The panel discussion was held during the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s (CBCF) Annual Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C.
Former NASA engineer and co-founder of STEMBoard Aisha Bowe moderated the ALC panel discussion on expanding STEM opportunities for young minorities. (www.aishabowe.com)
Moderated by former NASA engineer Aisha Bowe, the co-founder of STEMBoard, the panel included STEAM ambassador and Patcasso Art LLC founder Patrick Hunter; Quality Education for Minorities CEO Dr. Ivory Toldson; Johns Hopkins chair and Surgeon in Chief Dr. Robert Higgins; and INROADS, Inc. President and CEO Forest T. Harper.
Congressman G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) kicked off the conversation, which was focused on increasing opportunities in STEM careers for underrepresented youth.
“The STEM field is important to our country, it’s critical to jobs in the 21st century—jobs that make the big bucks,” Butterfield told the excited students from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and Carver Technology Early College High School, who participated in the session. “To succeed, we need to draw from the best in our community.”
Butterfield continued: “The lack of African-Americans in STEM means that many of our best minds are not included.”
In 2016, Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and Carver Technology Early College High School formed a partnership with Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Kaiser Permanente, and the University of Maryland at Baltimore for a P-TECH program that offers health science degrees in areas of concentration like health information technology, respiratory care, or surgical technology.
The program creates a school-to-industry pipeline for students in STEM fields.
Eugene Chung Qui, the principal at Dunbar High School, said the visit to the CBCF event excited his students, who are enrolled in STEM courses.
“Being that our focus and the mission of the school is to push our students into STEM fields, this is an excellent opportunity for the children to be able to talk with and ask questions of such an esteemed panel,” Chung Qui said.
Another panelist, Tamberlin Golden of General Motors, noted the company’s passion for STEM.
“Technology, right now, is disrupting everything in the industry,” Golden said. “Now, people are looking for connectivity, autonomy, electrification, and convenience. We have to monitor thoroughly how we manufacture our cars.”
Tamberlin continued: “If you want to make a good wage from ‘Day 1,’ you want to go [with STEM]. GM has been very invested in this and we want to partner with many organizations.”
A report released, earlier this year, from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration revealed that there were nine million STEM workers in the United States in 2015.
About 6.1 percent of all workers are in STEM occupations, up from 5.5 percent just five years earlier, according to the report.
Employment in STEM occupations grew much faster than employment in non-STEM occupations over the last decade—24.4 percent versus 4 percent, respectively—and STEM occupations are projected to grow by 8.9 percent through 2024, compared to 6.4 percent growth for non- STEM occupations.
STEM workers command higher wages, earning 29 percent more than their non-STEM counterparts.
Further, nearly three-quarters of STEM workers have at least a college degree, compared to just over one-third of non-STEM workers.
The report also revealed that STEM degree holders enjoy higher earnings, regardless of whether they work in STEM or non-STEM occupations.
“When I was in high school, I was a truant and I was unfocused, because my parents were going through a nasty divorce and I just wanted to go hang out with my friends,” said Bowe, an aeronautical engineer and entrepreneur who manages multi-million dollar defense contracts and private-sector technology clients.
“I started with pre-algebra,” Bowe shared, then speaking directly to the students she said, “We want you to understand that in entering STEM, you’re entering into an unlimited field.”
About 1 out of every 10 public school students in the United States right now is learning to speak English. They’re called ELLs, for “English Language Learners.”
There are nearly 5 million of them, and educating them — in English and all the other subjects and skills they’ll need — is one of the biggest challenges in U.S. public education today.
As part of our reporting project, 5 Million Voices, we set out to gather up all the data and information we could find about who these students are and how they’re being taught. Here’s our snapshot:
The vast majority — some 3.8 million ELL students — speak Spanish. But there are lots of other languages too, including Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Arabic and Vietnamese.
New York Times Magazine — In the days leading up to and after Betsy DeVos’s confirmation as secretary of education, a hashtag spread across Twitter: #publicschoolproud. Parents and teachers tweeted photos of their kids studying, performing, eating lunch together. People of all races tweeted about how public schools changed them, saved them, helped them succeed. The hashtag and storytelling was a rebuttal to DeVos, who called traditional public schools a “dead end” and who bankrolled efforts to pass reforms in Michigan, her home state, that would funnel public funds in the form of vouchers into religious and privately operated schools and encouraged the proliferation of for-profit charter schools. The tweets railed against DeVos’s labeling of public schools as an industry that needed to adopt the free-market principles of competition and choice. #Publicschoolproud was seen as an effort to show that public schools still mattered.
But the enthusiastic defense obscured a larger truth: We began moving away from the “public” in public education a long time ago. In fact, treating public schools like a business these days is largely a matter of fact in many places. Parents have pushed for school-choice policies that encourage shopping for public schools that they hope will give their children an advantage and for the expansion of charter schools that are run by private organizations with public funds. Large numbers of public schools have selective admissions policies that keep most kids out. And parents pay top dollar to buy into neighborhoods zoned to “good” public schools that can be as exclusive as private ones. The glaring reality is, whether we are talking about schools or other institutions, it seems as if we have forgotten what “public” really means.
State education chiefs at a Senate hearing Tuesday outlined how they are using the Every Student Succeeds Act to initiate and expand on efforts to improve college- and career-readiness and help low-performing schools. Senators, meanwhile, expressed concerns along partisan lines about the proper balance of power between Washington and the states.
Congress has been mostly silent this year on public school policy in terms of hearings and other events. But Tuesday’s hearing at the Senate education committee allowed for Candice McQueen of Tennessee, Christopher Ruszkowski of New Mexico, and John White of Louisiana to share their approaches to ESSA and how it was affecting their approach to public school more broadly.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the committee chairman, specifically praised the states represented by the chiefs testifying at the hearing. For example, he highlighted his home state of Tennessee’s work under ESSA to determine whether students are ready for the military or the workforce after high school, not just college. He also gave a thumbs-up to New Mexico for increasing access to services ranging from extra math help to early education through its ESSA plan…
Washington – When the Every Student Succeeds Act passed in 2015, there was widespread worry that states would walk away from making sure that particular groups of students, English-language learners, students in special education, and racial minorities, mattered in their school accountability systems.
Now that pretty much every state has filed its plan to implement the law have those fears become the reality?
States are working to make sure that’s not the case, said several state chiefs who spoke on a panel here moderated by Chris Minnich, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers. (Some advocates are skeptical more…
The education field can always count on shifting priorities. Over the past 20 years, in an attempt to “fix” what many people dub a broken public school system, everyone from politicians to famous athletes to business moguls to education leaders has tried to find and repair the gaps in student achievement. But many educators are skeptical of new initiatives that come down the pike. Is a revamped approach really meant to help prepare children for the future, or is it just people outside of education sticking their noses where they don’t belong?
That certainly rings true in the STEM vs. STEAM argument of the past decade. In recent years, science, technology, engineering, and math have been at the center of our schools’ change fabric. These fields are desperate to fill jobs that didn’t exist before the 21st century. According to the 2016 U.S. News/Raytheon STEM Index, there were more than 230,000 additional STEM jobs and less than 31,000 additional graduates in these fields in 2014-15 alone. To help close that gap, President Barack Obama rolled out investments and initiatives to increase STEM education.
As schools expanded into high-tech gadget hubs, many educators argued for the integration of arts into STEM learning to bring needed creativity to the learning process. Others pushed back for keeping the arts separate, saying that adding the arts to STEM subjects simply created more distraction. While the STEAM movement has gained momentum, educators are still divided on arts integration…
The great education thinker John Dewey claimed that art is not the possession of a recognized few but the authentic expression of individuality for all. Among those who care about education, few would deny that the arts now struggle to survive in our nation’s schools. The visual and performing arts frequently are marginalized as fringe subjects, taking a back seat in school curricula when funds are tight or teaching time is usurped by subjects that count toward school accountability measures.
Yet a growing number of researchers and educators are in agreement that participation in the arts should become a central component of schooling, as research suggests that the arts can be a significant factor in improving academic outcomes. This premise may cause some arts advocates to bristle, believing that arts experiences are important for the sheer joy of human expression and that educators should not have to justify access to the arts as a way to increase learning.
That may be true, but it is hard to ignore the growing body of research that correlates arts experiences with multiple domains of learning, including academic achievement, motivation, and thinking skills. Moreover, using art forms as a pedagogical tool in teaching other subjects—known as arts integration—is showing promise for enabling students to learn and retain academic content, according to a thorough literature review by Gail Burnaford and other researchers published for the Arts Education Partnership. Students in schools that offer arts-integrated learning are more likely to show better academic outcomes, transfer knowledge from arts to nonarts domains, and demonstrate greater motivation and engagement in learning.
Despite those findings, some educators resist using the arts as a way to teach and reinforce content. In my experience leading schools, offering professional development, and teaching graduate and doctoral-level courses, I have encountered reluctance for incorporating the arts into instructional practices. Three common scenarios stand out for classroom teachers:
“Arts provide another vehicle for students with limited language or lower academic skills to demonstrate mastery of academic content.”
The teacher would like to use more arts-based activities, noting that students remember more content and seem to enjoy the subject matter better when the arts are incorporated into lessons compared with using only traditional methods. The teacher worries, however, that using arts activities will reduce the time needed to cover all the required curriculum.
The teacher believes that she is not very artistic and finds it hard to imagine the kind of arts activities that would enhance learning math; it is easier to follow traditional teaching strategies.
The teacher worries that low-performing students need more time in remediation and would not learn as much without highly structured curricula that offer repetition of essential content and skills.Noting the concerns of educators and the dearth of research that explores the causal effects of arts integration on memory for academic content, our research team at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education conducted randomized control trials to test the efficacy of arts-integrated science units (the treatment condition) compared with conventional science units (the control condition). We designed treatment and control units using the same science content and designed arts activities that would require the same amount of teaching time as in conventional lessons.
In this package, Education Week has convened a range of researchers, professors, and practitioners to argue their case for arts education’s path forward. Despite their many contrasting opinions, these experts all agree on one thing: Arts instruction is key to American schooling and is worth supporting, researching, and protecting.
This special section is supported by a grant from The Wallace Foundation. Education Week retained sole editorial control over the content of this package; the opinions expressed are the authors’ own, however.
We also matched the mode of delivery (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) to assure active learning experiences in both conditions. In the course of the studies, we provided professional development for teachers to show that robust arts-based teaching can be easily incorporated into lessons. For example, using songs, movement, and visual vocabulary does not require extensive arts training or elaborate materials.
In our studies, each randomized group of students received a science unit in either the treatment or control condition and a second science unit in the opposite condition. According to the results of delayed post-tests, arts-integrated teaching showed an advantage for long-term retention of science content. That increase in retention in the arts-integrated units was especially strong for students at the lowest levels of reading achievement. We believe, therefore, that the arts provide another vehicle for students with limited language or lower academic skills to demonstrate mastery of academic content.
Our studies provide some preliminary causal connections between arts-integrated learning and memory for content. The findings also raise some interesting questions about whether learning through the arts transfers residual benefits. We observed that students who experienced the arts-integrated units first performed significantly better in subsequent conventional units compared with students who had not yet experienced the arts-integrated units. That made us wonder if students who were taught using arts-integrated instruction may have later applied arts-based strategies, even when not taught through the arts.
These observations open interesting possibilities that warrant further investigation. Do the arts aid in thinking dispositions and problem-solving skills, as some researchers have suggested? Perhaps the current focus on 21st-century skills of creative problem-solving will lead us back to the arts as a fruitful alternative to conventional teaching—as Dewey suggested at the start of the 20th century.
Mariale Hardiman is a professor of education and the vice dean of academic affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. She is the co-founder and the director of the Neuro-Education Initiative, a cross-disciplinary program that brings educators relevant research from the learning sciences to inform teaching and learning.
