Teacher Turns 'Crazy Idea' Into New School

Condensed from an article by Thom Patterson posted on CNN.com, September 9, 2009

"I have a crazy idea": Those five words changed a simple meeting of school officials into the realization of Kim Ursetta's dream.

Ursetta, then president of a local teachers' union, blurted out those words 18 months ago during a meeting in the office of Denver, Colorado's, schools superintendent.

The other officials in the room leaned in as Ursetta leaped into a sales pitch that would turn an ordinary day into a highlight of her career.

"I want to start a new kind of school," she said, a union-sponsored public school led by teachers, not a principal.

"I started talking about 21st century skills and wanting to prepare our kids in math and science, especially our low-income and ethnic minority students," Ursetta said. "We've been doing schools the same way in this nation for 150 years, so if we don't step up, then nothing is going to change."

Superintendent Michael Bennet -- now the state's freshman U.S. senator -- did not say no to the idea, and Ursetta walked out the door "excited" and "shocked."

She immediately started "pulling together a group of teachers to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and ask how you would do a school differently."

Three weeks ago, Ursetta's dream became a reality, as Mathematics and Science Leadership Academy opened its doors to 142 kindergartners and first- and second-grade students in Denver's mostly low-income, largely Hispanic Athmar Park neighborhood.

A board-certified, 16-year teaching veteran, Ursetta, 38, believes the lack of teacher flexibility ranks among the top barriers blocking the nation's children from receiving the best education possible.

As a teacher at traditional schools, Ursetta said she and her colleagues weren't allowed to change the order of their lessons.

Two of the school's 12 teachers take on administrative duties as "lead teachers," performing the traditional role of a principal.

Although they follow school board-approved curriculum and standards, instructors can easily rearrange lessons to "make better sense for the kids" -- making better connections between different subject matter, Ursetta said.

Sometimes, for example, it makes sense to group Ursetta's kindergarten students with first-graders working on the same subject.

"You normally would have to ask permission to do that," she said. "But here, we just do it. We're able to try different things to teach them instead of just following a script."

The lack of quality school leadership is a big reason that experienced teachers leave their schools, Ursetta said. "Studies show when you take accomplished teachers and allow them to have a leadership role, that's when they see the most success. Scores just soar. That's how we're focused here."

NYT's Steve Lohr on Online Education

Steve Lohr, a New York Times reporter, posted this account of online education on August 19, 2009. Note how it emphasizes online learning's potential for teaching collaboration...

Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom
By Steve Lohr

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.

This hardly means that we’ll be saying good-bye to classrooms. But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.

Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has really changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.

The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.

“We are at an inflection point in online education,” said Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program.
The biggest near-term growth, Mr. Regier predicts, will be in continuing education programs. Today, Arizona State has 5,000 students in its continuing education programs, both through in-person classes and online. In three to five years, he estimates, that number could triple, with nearly all the growth coming online.

But Mr. Regier also thinks online education will continue to make further inroads in transforming college campuses as well. Universities — and many K-12 schools — now widely use online learning management systems, like Blackboard or the open-source Moodle. But that is mostly for posting assignments, reading lists, and class schedules and hosting some Web discussion boards.

Mr. Regier sees things evolving fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology. More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said. For example, it will be assumed that college students know the basics of calculus, and the classroom time will focus on applying the math to real-world problems — perhaps in exploring the physics of climate change or modeling trends in stock prices, he said.

“The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways,” Mr. Regier said. “People are correct when they say online education will take things out of the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”

What the College Rankings Won't Tell You

Thanks to Scott Tilden for passing along this article and making us take a closer look at “what you get for the money” when choosing your college or university.

New website and report grade universities on education, not reputation

WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 19, 2009)—How much will it cost? How is it ranked? And how hard is it to get in? Many college guides and rankings answer these questions. But there is one question that none of them even ask: What will students learn?

A new, free website for parents and students, WhatWillTheyLearn.com, does just that.

Launched today by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, WhatWillTheyLearn.com will be featured in a full-page ad in U.S. News & World Report’s 2010 college rankings, which are released tomorrow. The website evaluates colleges and universities based on their general education curricula: the core courses aimed at providing a strong foundation of knowledge.

WhatWillTheyLearn.com assigns each institution a grade from “A” to “F” based on how many of the following seven core subjects it requires: Composition, Mathematics, Science, Economics, Foreign Language, Literature, and American Government or History. Only a handful get A’s.

“Employers are increasingly dissatisfied with college graduates who lack the basic knowledge and skills expected of any educated person,” said ACTA president Anne D. Neal. “If our students are to compete successfully in the global marketplace, we simply can’t leave their learning up to chance. As it is, thousands are paying dearly for a thin and patchy education.”

Mel Elfin, founding editor of U.S. News & World Report's college rankings, praised the website as “an invaluable and unique additional resource for parents.” “By focusing on what students are getting in the classroom, this new resource highlights what in the long run is far more important than the name of the institution on a graduate’s diploma,” said Elfin.

ACTA simultaneously released a printed report on general education, also entitled What Will They Learn?, which grades 100 leading colleges and universities in the same manner as the website. The low marks received by many institutions show students are graduating without math, science, and other fundamentals and underscore the urgent need for parents, students, and policymakers to focus on what colleges expect of their students.

How do the 100 colleges and universities fare?
• 42 institutions receive a “D” or an “F” for requiring two or fewer subjects.
• 5 institutions receive an “A” for requiring six subjects: Brooklyn College, Texas A&M, UT-Austin, University of Arkansas, and West Point. No institution requires all seven.
• Paying a lot doesn’t necessarily get you a lot: Average tuition at the 11 schools that require no subjects is $37,700. At the 5 schools that get an “A”, it’s $5,400.
• “Flagship” state universities do a markedly better job with general education (average grade of “C”) than the top liberal arts colleges and national universities (with an “F” average) while charging much lower tuition and fees.

Which important subjects are not being required?
• Only 2 out of 100 require economics (University of Alaska-Fairbanks & West Point)
• Only 11 out of 100 require American government or history
• Barely half—53 out of 100—require mathematics

“This study demonstrates that our colleges and universities have abdicated their responsibility to direct their students to the most important subjects,” said Neal. “No eighteen-year-old, even the brightest, should have to determine which combination of courses comprises a comprehensive education. But most colleges are offering nothing more than a ‘do-it-yourself’ education.”

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is an independent non-profit dedicated to academic freedom, academic excellence, and accountability. Since its founding in 1995, ACTA has counseled boards, educated the public and published reports about such issues as good governance, historical literacy, core curricula, the free exchange of ideas, and accreditation in higher education. For further information, visit http://www.goacta.org./

The Crime the Schools Are Committing to Our Children

by Anthony Pellegrino, respected CNMI community leader, educator and founder of the Northern Marianas Trades Institute, also widely known as a highly successful entrepreneur in bottled water and aquaculture.

The new school term has begun. For many students it will be a nightmare. They know that they will be returning to a dreary day of sitting in a classroom struggling for five hours to read and to write. For them the printed word and the written word remain a mystery. As they glance around the room, they silently envy the other students that have little difficulty in those activities. These are the students that many teachers and school districts have written off as “school failures.” These are the students who cannot read and write on their grade level. But whose fault is it that they are in such a dilemma?

As these students approach the legal age of 16 for school drop-outs, they learn to tolerate abuse both silent and verbal heaped upon them from the teachers and fellow students. They realize that college is only a dream for them. Only poor paying jobs or welfare awaits them. Is it any wonder they feel frustrated and want to run away?

Other students who also have low reading and writing abilities somehow manage to get into a college. There they spend the first year or perhaps two years taking basic reading and writing courses before they are capable of tackling the regular curriculum. Does it have to be this way?

What if educators decided to wrestle with poor readers and poor writers when they first notice them in early childhood? Would it cost so much more money to train these students to read and write by the time they graduate from high school? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile spending extra time or a different approach to assist these slow learners? Is it better to worry about the majority of the students and forget that we are creating potential social dropouts and candidates for violence and welfare candidates?

All students study the same subjects in the same grade and are treated in the same manner. One size is supposed to fit all. But what if we sorted out the slow learners and gave them extra attention? Keep the same five hours but change the courses to fit the individual student’s ability. When a student shows difficulty in reading or writing, change the approach.

Instead of forcing the student to take the usual English course, he should be placed in a remedial class. The same should be done when the student shows a lack of writing ability for his age level. Instead of feeding him a block of knowledge that the curriculum spells out, deviate from it and concentrate on his deficiency. Would we feed the body the same food and medicine when the child is sick? No, we would adopt the food and medicine to fit the illness.

I am not trying to tell professional educators how they should teach or what they should teach. But when a student is not grasping the basics of reading and writing, why do educators insist that the one size must fit him or he is cast aside? Don’t they realize what they are doing to the student? They are silently branding him as a loser in life.

We should judge educators on their success rate of how many students can really read and write, not on how many students they pass along. With all the new technology and with new teaching techniques, educators must eliminate or at least minimize the number of poor readers and poor writers. This achievement should be the true measure of success for any school system.

To solve the problem, extra money is not needed, extra teachers are not needed, extra space is not needed. What is needed is a determination by the school staff to eliminate or at least greatly minimize poor reading and writing habits of slow learners. It is a matter of arranging classes and schedules. Make the system flexible instead of a rigid one based on one method must fit all.

I strongly feel that the elementary and middle grades are to be used to teach how to study and how to read and write. Only when a student reaches high school should facts and concepts be taught. Instead too many schools insist on trying to make students absorb meaningless facts without the ability to read and write about them.

How gratifying it would be if more students were motivated to read and write instead of being shoved along because the system demands it. When will educators realize the crime they are committing by allowing students to go through their system without the ability to read and write? Think of all the minds they are wasting! Think of all the future social problems they are creating by not correcting these problems now!

In conclusion, if educators are truly interested in improving the education of children, educators must develop new ideas to remedy these chronic problems. They must motivate slow learners to improve their writing and reading abilities.

To me the phrase: No child left behind—means he or she must be able to read and write on his grade level. By the time the student leaves high school he must be fairly proficient in those two skills. Forget teaching useless facts. Teach skills of reading and writing and the facts will come later with meaning.

Stop wasting young minds! Stop condemning students to failure in life! A student saved is a potential contributor to our society. Where there is a will there is a method!

PREFACE TO UP-COMING BOOK: EARLY INTERVENTION GAMES

Attitudes toward autism have gone through many changes. In my first twenty years as an occupation therapist, I had two clients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). They were considered exotic birds, their rocking, spinning and hand flapping were called “self-stimming,” and their behavior was blamed squarely on the coldness of their “refrigerator moms.”

Now, these once atypical children are common in my caseload, and self-stimulating behavior is more accurately acknowledged as self-calming. Instead of being blamed, their moms are honored for their ability to cope with their sensitive children.

The jury is still out on the cause of autism, but what is apparent is that the brains of these children process information differently. Now that we understand the plasticity of the brain, modern therapies are aimed towards helping these children connect the dots in ways that other children do so they can better fit into our world.

There are even people nowadays who propose that children in the spectrum and with sensory processing disorders (SPD) are more advanced rather than less than their peers. A growing awareness of autistic savants, with genius mixed into their social differences, adds some muscle to that theory.

It’s an interesting thought. I think of Reggie, one of “my” kids. I was watching him blow bubbles recently and saw him mesmerized by the way the light refracted off the iridescent bubbles. If you really pay attention, bubbles are amazingly beautiful and Reggie was just as delighted and appreciative of the fortieth bubble blown as he was of the first. (Talk about being in the present moment!) Reggie’s ability to notice details also makes him the only one in his pre-school class to know the names and sounds of every letter in the alphabet. I envy his contentment in solitary play and not seeming to care or notice what others think of him.

What would it be like if kids like Reggie were just seen as one in a variety of human possibilities? I won’t be surprised if sometime in the not too distant future, it might be considered "cool" to be autistic or to have unique ways of processing the world. Terms such as Sensory Processing Differences will be used instead of Disorders and we all will learn to be sensitive to our needs and how to regulate and calm our systems.

Meanwhile, we parents and therapist and friends who love these children can make them feel welcomed and find ways to help them acquire needed skills. One way will always be playing. Play is the brain’s way of learning and our way to enjoy our lives and to give love to each other. Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant whose skills may make "Rainman" look like he had memory problems, points out in his book, Born on a Blue Day, that what made his childhood miserable were the children who couldn’t accept him as he was, but what made his development flourish was his parents who did.

www.gameslady.com

Khadijah Williams, 18, overcomes a lifetime in shelters and on skid row

By Esmeralda Bermudez, condensed from the Los Angeles Times, June 20, 2009

Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion.

Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework.

Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago.
What students don't know is that she is also a homeless girl.

As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn't smell or look disheveled.

On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep -- survival skills she applied with passion to her education.

Only a few mentors and Harvard officials know her background. She never wanted other students to know her secret -- not until her plane left for the East Coast hours after her Friday evening graduation.

"I was so proud of being smart I never wanted people to say, 'You got the easy way out because you're homeless,' " she said. "I never saw it as an excuse."

"I have felt the anger at having to catch up in school . . . being bullied because they knew I was poor, different, and read too much," she wrote in her college essays. "I knew that if I wanted to become a smart, successful scholar, I should talk to other smart people.

"Khadijah was in third grade when she first realized the power of test scores, placing in the 99th percentile on a state exam. Her teachers marked the 9-year-old as gifted, a special category that Khadijah, even at that early age, vowed to keep.

She finished only half of fourth grade, half of fifth and skipped sixth. Seventh grade was split between Los Angeles and San Diego. Eighth grade consisted of two weeks in San Bernardino.

At every stop, Khadijah pushed to keep herself in each school's gifted program. She read nutrition charts, newspapers and four to five books a month, anything to transport her mind away from the chaos and the sour smell.

In 10th grade, Khadijah realized that if she wanted to succeed, she couldn't do it alone. She began to reach out to organizations and mentors: the Upward Bound Program, Higher Edge L.A., Experience Berkeley and South Central Scholars; teachers, counselors and college alumni networks. They helped her enroll in summer community college classes, gave her access to computers and scholarship applications and taught her about networking.

When she enrolled in the fall of her junior year at Jefferson High School, she was determined to stay put, regardless of where her mother moved. Graduation was not far off and she needed strong college letters of recommendation from teachers who were familiar with her work.

This soon meant commuting by bus from an Orange County armory. She awoke at 4 a.m. and returned at 11 p.m., and kept her grade-point average at just below a 4.0 while participating in the Academic Decathlon, the debate team and leading the school's track and field team.

Khadijah graduated Friday evening with high honors, fourth in her class. She was accepted to more than 20 universities nationwide, including Brown, Columbia, Amherst and Williams. She chose a full scholarship to Harvard and aspires to become an education attorney.

She tried her best; she never smoked or drank, never did drugs, and she never put us in abusive situations. However, that was the best she could do.

She knows she was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a 14-year-old mother. She thinks Chantwuan might have been ostracized from her family. She may have tried to attend school, but the stress of a baby proved too much. When Khadijah was a toddler, they moved to California. A few years later, Jeanine was born.

She has chosen not to criticize her mother. Instead Khadijah said she inspired her to learn. "She would tell me I had a gift, she would call me Oprah."

When her college applications were due in December, James and Patricia London of South Central Scholars invited Khadijah to their home in Rancho Palos Verdes to help her write her essays.

She won't be the first homeless student to arrive at Harvard.

Julie Hilden, the Harvard interviewer who met with Khadijah to gauge whether she should be accepted, said it was clear from the start that Khadijah was a top candidate. But school officials had to make sure they could provide what she needed to make the transition successful.

"I think about how I can convince my peers about the value of education. . . . I have found that after all the teasing, these peers start to respect me . . . . I decided that I could be the one to uplift my peers . . . . My work is far reaching and never finished."

In the last six months, she saw her mother only a few times and on Thursday tried to find her. Khadijah headed to a South-Central storage facility where they last stored their belongings.

Proudly, Khadijah modeled her hunter green graduation cap and gown and practiced switching the tassel from right to left as she would during the ceremony.

"Look at you," her mother says. "You're really going to Harvard, huh?"

"Yeah," she says, pausing. "I'm going to Harvard."

The up side of autism

I enjoy thinking of ways that people within the autistic spectrum help humans evolve. I know it's not your usual perspective but with the increasing numbers of children identified, you know they will have an influence on life. What are the good parts?

My experience with children who have ASD shows me that there are many sensory issues that negatively affect them such as noises that are too loud, transitions that are too sudden and textures that are too rough. I suspect that many of these same issues negatively affect us all but we have learned to ignore them. Ignoring them is not validating their existence. They still have their effect on us.

How else to explain our ability to live, for example among the noise pollution of a big city. The honking cars, screeching sirens, noisy jackhammers are all tolerated on one level but add to our unease and irritability on a more unconscious level.

Children within the Spectrum won't tolerate or ignore and might have a meltdown if the situation isn't changed. For example, we might go to a crowded restaurant and be slightly uncomfortable with the lack of elbow room or continual chatter. Instead of realizing the sensory source of our discomfort, we might, instead, see faults with the waiter or get annoyed with some aspect of the conversation when, really, the main issue is that we, too, are in sensory overload. Spectrum children will instead insist on leaving or just "lose it" until taken outside. They will eventually need to learn methods to help them cope such as wearing headphone or purposely choosing quieter environments.

The lesson is that we all would benefit from learning what our individual unique sensitivities are. Do we need more time in nature than we are getting? Would we be more comfortable in our bodies if our clothing were softer to the touch? Would we do better in a noisy crowd if we had on an ipod with comforting music? Do we need more time to ease into our day?

People within the Spectrum are learning to understand and honor their sensitivities and limits. Perhaps one of their contributions is that they are showing us that we need to do the same thing.