Saturday, December 8, 2012

Printed: Education Things


Teachers only spend 4 hours a day in the classroom, and take 2 hours a week for "professional development".
Some things that have caught my attention lately:


FINLAND: Oh, Finland. The country with consistent wonderful education outcomes for years and years, studied and admired by all. This recent article gave some facts about how they do things that I hadn´t heard before - I´d be curious to find out how true these things are for all schools, but it´s definitely food for thought.  (no school until age 7? teachers spending 4 hours per day in the classroom?? and they all have masters???)


FRANCE: The President has proposed banning homework in elementary and middle school, stating that it ¨penalizes children with difficult home situations.¨ His proposal has been met with much criticism, espeically from parents. Hmm.

UNITED STATES: The latest graduation rates have been released. People are warned that since the criteria for measurement has changed this year, comparison to other years may be skewed.  Michigan came in at 74% and Illinois came in at 84%.  It´s ironic that our nation´s capitol has the lowest rate at 59%.  Iowa is surprisingly the highest, at 88%! (AND they have pretty consistent figures across the board, not just one demographic inflating the number).

CNN points out, Looking at the data itself another picture emerges - a gap between whites and blacks still exists, but an even wider gap persists between the general graduation rates and the graduation rates of children with disabilities and limited English profiency students. For these subgroups, graduation rates in many states are below 50%, and sometimes even below 30%.  Only 23% of students with disabilities in Mississippi graduate high school!! Where are the IEPs? Where is the support? Where is the outrage?

The comments from the public are really heated.  One person pointed out, there are appears to be little, if any, correlation between the amount spent per student and the graduation rates. I don´t know enough about funding to know at a glance how accurate that is, but it´s interesting.

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