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July 2007
HOPE Falls
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As predicted previously, the number of students eligible for the state’s HOPE scholarship plummeted this year because of more stringent standards for qualifying. According to today’s story by my colleague Matt Kempner, figures from the Georgia Student Finance Commission show that only about a third of this year’s graduates — roughly 18,000 fewer students — will be able to use Georgia’s Lottery-funded college scholarship this year.
In previous years, more than half of the state’s graduates earned the scholarship.
Even with changes in the way a student’s grade point average is calculated, HOPE is still relatively easy to get. There’s no essay or interview. SAT scores don’t matter. Scholarship winners don’t even need an A average.
I’ve only been in Georgia for a few years. But since then it seemed to me that HOPE was viewed largely as a right for every high school graduate. I didn’t realize until Matt and I discussed it the other day that the scholarship was created for low-income students.
Some might say it’s time to move the program back to its original intentions. But as we’ve seen, the Lottery is flush with cash. If the money isn’t spent on Pre-K and college scholarships, what do you do with it?
UPDATE: A small Methodist college in Cherokee County has told students not to worry about missing out on HOPE this year, according to the latest story by Matt Kempner. If incoming freshman would have qualified for the state scholarship under the old rules, Reinhardt College is giving them $2,000 each to offset the financial burden of the $14,800 tuition. I guess all colleges aren’t concerned that high schools have uniform grading policies after all.
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Grad Coaches: Do You Believe The Hype?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Late last week, Gov. Sonny Perdue spoke to 450 middle school graduation coaches at a summer training conference in Macon.
The men and women represent the first group of graduation coaches whose job will be to prepare sixth, seventh and eighth-graders for success in high school and beyond.
You may recall that Perdue created the graduation coach position (originally called “completion counselors”) as part of his 2006 election-year education agenda. Initially, the program was only for high school students. But during the campaign Perdue said the initiative was so successful (although it was barely two months old) that he vowed to extend it to middle schools if re-elected.
Earlier this year, Perdue made good on that promise by setting aside $18 million to expand the program for the coming school year. Now we have one graduation coach for every public middle school in Georgia.
Perdue and his staff have been talking up this program from the get-go, and Friday’s press release about the governor’s appearance in Macon was no exception.
According to the release, about 65 percent of the seniors helped by graduation coaches this year earned diplomas. That’s fewer than the 71 percent of the total senior class who graduated. But the governor’s scribes didn’t mention that.
Instead, they boasted that 65 percent was”higher than the graduation rate for all students in 2002.”
I found this statement a bit odd. So I called the governor’s press office to find out why they were comparing student performance this year to kids who graduated five years ago.
“We’re just pointing out that it’s a number that we think is a pretty positive step in the right direction,” Bert Brantley, one of the governor’s spokesmen, said. “We’re graduating more at-risk seniors than we did all students just five years ago.”
A valid comparison or just more graduation coach hype?
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Of Footballs And Textbooks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This coming school year, high school football players who attend campuses in Atlanta’s city school system will be getting some extra, intensive training. But victory on the field is not the goal, graduation is.
With a $180,000 donation from the Chick-fil-A college football bowl, Atlanta Public Schools will be hiring an extra, part-time coach for each team to focus exclusively on improving athletes’ academic performance.
As of earlier this week, most of the new coaches had been hired. Officials are expected to formally announce the initiative today.
The program, “Play It Smart,” was started by the National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame nine years ago as a way to promote success off the field for students who don’t have the support at home.
Atlanta’s Mays High School has been involved in the past. But now all of the system’s high schools will participate.
Organizers tout some impressive statistics as proof of the program’s success in helping at-risk students: 95 percent of their seniors graduate and 80 percent head to college.
I wonder: Will those kinds of graduation and college-going rates ever be considered the norm?
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Playing Politics With School Funding, Again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Although the legislative session ended months ago, Georgia’s esteemed governor and her lawmakers are in a virtual tug-of-war over who gets to determine how your tax money is being spent.
Remember the dispute over the elementary foreign language classes? Gov. Sonny Perdue wanted to eliminate the small program, which allowed slightly more than two dozen campuses to offer foreign language classes to students who normally wouldn’t get such instruction until middle or high school.
Before the session ended, the Legislature agreed to allocate close to $1.6 million to let the program continue — much to the delight of parents in metro Atlanta whose children had benefited from the course work. But, instead of signing the budget and letting the wishes of state senators and representatives stand, Perdue made changes to allocations he didn’t agree with — changes, mind you, that weren’t in keeping with the budget the Legislature passed.
Guess what happened to the foreign language money? According to James Salzer’s story today, Perdue told state Department of Education officials to use the $1.6 million to instead give elementary schools throughout the state $1,200 each for foreign language materials.
That caused some of the 29 campuses in the elementary foreign language program to drop their classes for the coming school year.
Now, I’m afraid I know the answer to this question. But I just gotta ask: Is anyone out there bothered that the governor’s fretting over how a miniscule fraction of the state’s $20.2 billion budget was spent, when, after nearly three years, his Education Finance Task Force has yet to come up with a plan for how to fund Georgia’s financially strapped public schools?
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Pre-K: Something’s Gotta Give
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It didn’t take a fortune teller to predict that parents in Cobb County would be scrambling to find schools for their 4-year-olds after the county school system decided to pull out of the state’s free Pre-K program earlier this year.
Now, hundreds of anxious parents have put their children on waiting lists, hoping against hope that they’ll get into one of the remaining programs.
The problem: Last school year, the school system was able to serve more than 500 children through Pre-K. But, so far, private providers have replaced only 300 of those spots.
Georgia’s free, Lottery-funded pre-kindergarten program is open to any 4-year-old, so long as parents can find their children a seat in one of the classes — and there’s the rub, as Shakespeare would say. Finding openings is a problem throughout metro Atlanta, not just in Cobb, where the situation has obviously been exacerbated.
What I found interesting about Diane Stepp’s story today was that the majority of Cobb’s free pre-kindergarten classes had been concentrated in areas where the numbers of poor, immigrant children are the highest. So the kids that need free options the most are being hit hardest by the system’s pullout.
Years ago, when Pre-K first started, it was actually geared toward low-income or “at-risk” families. But the income cap was lifted soon after and now even the wealthiest families can participate.
Still, only about half (52 percent) of all eligible families use the state program. Certainly, some in the other half are paying to send their little ones to tuition-based programs and others have decided that 4 is simply too young to begin school.
But I’m starting to wonder: Are families not using Pre-K simply because they can’t find an open class?
Bye, Bye: Clayton Superintendent On Her Way Out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Rumors had been swirling for weeks that Clayton County Superintendent Barbara Pulliam was on the way out after three years of tumult in the South Side school system. Now, we know the scuttlebutt was true.
According to a story by my colleague, Eric Stirgus, Pulliam tendered her resignation during a closed-door meeting of the Clayton Board of Education last night. Spokesman Charles White told Eric that Pulliam was leaving for “personal reasons.”
I suspect, as always, that there’s much more to the story.
I covered Clayton schools for a short time a couple of years ago — back when Pulliam and the board decided to bring hand-held metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs onto campuses to try to cut down on the substantial incidents of crime and violence. My impression then of Pulliam, who had cut her teeth in the tough inner-city schools in Chicago, was that she was a no-nonsense administrator. There was no way she was going to put up with hooligans attending her campuses.
But, from the beginning, it seemed she had an image problem — not just with teachers and other employees, but also with the community. Many felt that Pulliam, who had come to Clayton in 2004 from a tiny school system in Minnesota, was unyielding in her management style. They seemed to resent an outsider coming in and telling them how they were going to teach their students and run their schools — even though they initially had welcomed her with open arms.
Pulliam walked into a less-than-ideal situation when she was hired as Clayton’s first black female superintendent. Infighting among board members had created such an untenable situation that the system — now Georgia’s fifth largest — was in danger of losing its accreditation.
It seems her tenure was ill fated from the start.
So I can’t help but wonder: With all of the problems that Clayton has been facing in the past few years, would it have been different for anyone else?
UPDATE: As some of you already have noted, Clayton’s interim superintendent has a bit of a checkered past. In 1996, Gloria Duncan was fired from her job as principal at North Clayton Middle School after she gave teachers vocabulary words from a standardized test — before the exam was administered. But four years later the school system hired her back as an assistant principal at Riverdale Middle School. Upon her re-hiring, Duncan told the AJC: “We’ll do everything straight by the book. I’m more seasoned. I know a lot more. I think you only grow when you learn from your mistakes.”
The Great Year-Round Schooling Debate
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After slightly more than a month of summer vacation, more than 1,200 students in Atlanta returned to school last week. The kids at Boyd, Centennial Place and Hutchinson elementary schools are the only public school students in the metro area that attend on a so-called year-round calendar — where children start earlier in the summer (July 16) and end later in the spring (June 6) than usual.
Basically, the students attend on a quarterly schedule with lengthy, three-to-four-week breaks between, or during, each quarter.
One of the theories behind the year-round schools movement is that the students will need less review — and will therefore learn more — if they avoid the months-long summer break where there’s the ever-present danger of “learning loss.”
Year-round schooling has not been a popular option here, at least for public schools. According to information from the Georgia Department of Education, only two public school systems in the state — Atlanta and Muscogee County — operate year-round campuses.
Fulton County had two year-round campuses. But officials there decided to switch College Park and Parklane elementary schools back to a traditional calendar for the coming school year.
Spokeswoman Susan Hale told me that administrators hadn’t found any “strong” evidence that student achievement improved because of the unique calendar. Of course, there are a variety of reasons that could explain why Fulton’s foray into year-round schooling failed — including that, according to Susan, student attendance was typically low during the first few weeks of the school year.
Could it be that the success or failure of year-round schools — like many education initiatives — depends largely upon one thing: Parental buy-in?
Fighting The Teacher Shortage: The Special Education Front
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As most of you know, along with math and science, special education departments have been struggling with a chronic teacher shortage.
According to the latest data from the Professional Standards Commission, more than 5,700 new special education teachers were needed in Georgia classrooms during the 2005-06 school year. But fewer than 300 teacher program graduates opted to go into special education that year — a huge gap, to say the least.
A few years ago, Gwinnett County began using a private firm to specifically recruit special education teachers from India. And Clayton County had a big marketing and recruiting push about two years ago to find 100 new special education teachers.
Now, according to Kristina Torres’ story from yesterday, DeKalb County is taking a $2 million federal grant to lure non-educators into the special education teaching ranks. DeKalb officials plan to work with the University of Georgia to get the recruits the training and credentials they’ll need.
What’s different here is that officials plan to create an intensive mentoring and support program so that they have a better chance of holding onto the rookie educators. But, just in case, they’ve also stipulated that those admitted to the program will have to commit to DeKalb for five years.
It’ll be interesting to see how many stay on after the five-year mark.
Entrenched Public Schools: What Gives?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
During the past few weeks, I’ve been watching that new TV show where NBA star Shaquille O’Neal is trying to help some very overweight pre-teens get into shape.
When I first saw commercials for the show I figured the reality-TV weight-loss genre had reached a new low. But the ABC program actually has turned out to be a very polished educational documentary — with no trappings of the faked reality I’d been expecting.
What’s really been interesting to see is how Shaq — in his attempts to bring healthier cafeteria food to a Broward County, Fla., middle school and to convince the principal to devote more time to P.E. — keeps running into stubborn realities.
Shaq: Why can’t we set aside 20 minutes every day so that students can get some more exercise? Because I don’t have any extra time in the school day, the crabby principal retorts.
Shaq: Why can’t we make healthier meals that kids will enjoy eating instead of constantly dishing out greasy pizza and chicken patties? Tsktsk, the cafeteria ladies cluck, there’s not enough time in the morning to prepare such labor-intensive meals.
Watching this big-time celebrity get in way over his 7-foot 1-inch frame is comical and sad at the same time. Comical because it’s obvious Shaq had no clue how school systems work. Sad because the school administrators come off as so resistant to change.
Isn’t it ironic that educators — who make their living from learning — can sometimes be so entrenched in the same old ways?
School Spirit: Has It Gone Too Far?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I honestly do not know what to make of this story from Aileen Dodd about a new high-end subdivision in Lilburn that’s marketing itself to fans and boosters who love all things related to Parkview High School.
A street is named after the stadium. Children’s rooms in the model home play up the campus’ orange and blue colors.
Of course, it’s not the first subdivision to tie its identity to a local institution. My stepfather grew up in a Baltimore neighborhood that was the proud home of an aircraft manufacturer.
There the streets were named after airplane parts. How’d you like to live on Fuselage Avenue or Cockpit Street? Maybe you would prefer the more-dignified Left Wing Drive.
I, myself, have never heard of a subdivision connecting itself so closely to a high school — although, I’m sure others exist. I suppose it could be part of the recently reported trend of naming new public schools after community features, rather than civic leaders.
But because the Legends at Parkview touts the school’s athletic prowess, in particular, I’m wondering if it’s more a part of our country’s obsession with sports. As Aileen notes in her story, members of Parkview’s football team and the head coach were on hand for the subdivision’s grand opening.
Question: Is anyone out there having that this-has-gone-too-far feeling?
School Reputations: In The Eye Of The Beholder?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
School reputations are a funny thing. According to past polls I’ve seen and read about, parents tend to rate their own schools more highly than others — even when their campus has not met federally mandated academic standards.
In last year’s annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll on attitudes toward public schools, nearly half of those surveyed gave their community schools an “A” or “B” grade — pretty high marks for a nation that’s constantly wringing its hands over the state of public schools.
I started thinking about this after reading Diane Stepp’s story about how East Cobb Middle School last week shed the dreaded “needs improvement” label, given under the No Child Left Behind Act.
Principal David Chiprany seemed downright giddy that his campus had met the “adequate yearly progress” standards for two years in a row to shake off the designation. “This is a very huge step,” he told Diane. “…This will bolster the school’s reputation. Yes, it definitely will.”
Will it really? According to that PDK/Gallup poll, the closer people are to schools in the community, the higher the grades they give them. So, while 49 percent of residents rate their local schools favorably, parents are even more enthusiastic, with 64 percent giving their children’s campuses high marks.
They say beauty’s in the eye of the beholder. Is it possible a school’s reputation is, too, and that test scores and AYP ratings really have little bearing on community perceptions?
RSS And You
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve been meaning to tell you there’s a new way to keep track of Get Schooled’s daily discussions.
Some of you — I’m thinking of Jeff, specifically — already seem to have caught on. So I’m letting the rest of you in on the secret.
Instead of feverishly checking the site every day to see if something new has posted, you now can get automatic e-mail notifications or updated links to personalized Web pages whenever I post a new blog — no more fuming because it’s 12 o’clock and Bridget hasn’t posted anything.
It’s called RSS.
Check it out. Try it out. Embrace the technology.
You (and I) will be happy you did.
As The Lawsuit Turns: The Sequel
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the midst of all of the reporting I was doing on the state’s new vouchers program last week, I got an interesting e-mail from Joe Martin, executive director for the Consortium for Adequate School Funding in Georgia.
This is the group of 51 small, mostly rural school systems, which nearly three years ago filed a lawsuit saying the state was not properly funding their public schools. Turns out the group recently hired some additional legal help.
Martin had been complaining that the attorneys the state hired last year — from Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan — were trying to wear down the school systems’ with time-consuming and costly legal maneuvers — a modern-day David and Goliath, if you will.
With the hiring of Atlanta’s Rogers & Hardin, however, the consortium apparently is feeling more resolve than ever; although, Martin says he still believes a settlement would be better than a trial in this case.
“To paraphrase Mark Twain,” Martin wrote in his e-mail, “the rumors of our death were premature.”
The question: Has that death just been prolonged?
UPDATE: In case you missed it, there have been a couple news stories recently reporting that Georgia’s bank account is fatter than ever. First, we heard that the fiscal year ended with a $600 million surplus. Now, we learn Lottery sales, which pay for the state’s HOPE scholarship and Pre-K program, are at an all-time high. Yet, Gov. Sonny Perdue and state lawmakers insisted on continuing the education budget’s “austerity” cuts — to the tune of $140 million — this coming school year.
The Myth Of Summer Vacation
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I was reading a story by my colleague Laura Diamond earlier this week about how Gwinnett County registers its international students when this sentence stopped me cold: “The new school year begins Aug. 13.”
Excuse me? Only four measly weeks left ‘til the start of school?
There’s been so much education news lately — CRCT scores, AYP reports, debate over the high school graduation rules, a major Supreme Court decision on segregation, and the state’s new voucher program — I feel like the school year never ended.
The same day I read Laura’s story, my co-worker was talking about how her son’s day care center has been closed for vacation for two weeks. After only a few days, he was already antsy, asking: “Mommy, school?” As in, when can I go back to school?
Boy, when I was a kid summer was my refuge. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed school. But spending my days playing Pom-Pom at Glyndon pool, walking to Friendly’s to get ice cream and hanging out at my grandma’s house — those were halcyon days.
Every year, I have grand delusions that I’ll get some downtime during the summer months to regroup, refresh, relax. It never happens. So, despite all the complaints from teachers that I read here, I’m really starting to think that maybe teaching really is the best profession — at least for the summer vacation.
That Greene County Saga
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
There were lots of fireworks, figuratively speaking, after the State Board of Education meeting today — so much so that a visiting reporter from Athens asked if the meetings were always that exciting.
Unfortunately, no.
The issue stirring so many passions? That proposed charter school at Lake Oconee, which has roiled Greene County for months.
Board members today officially sanctioned a 10-year charter for a campus in the Greensboro area, near the ritzy Ritz-Carlton Lodge. Organizers hope to open by late August or early September with about 15 kindergartners in space they’re temporarily leasing from a church.
All the angst was over the structure of the academy’s attendance zone, which opponents said favored wealthy, white families with second homes in the area over less-affluent black families, who are stuck in the county’s under-performing public schools.
Nellie Stovall, whose niece and nephews attend some of those schools, had tears in her eyes as she spoke with me after the meeting. “Everybody wants a better education for their kids, but it’s like the black kids don’t count,” she said. “I want them to have the same privileges that the kids on the lake have.”
State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox, who recommended the charter’s approval, also got emotional as she spoke with hurt parents after the vote. “We should be remaking every school like a charter school,” she told one group. “Look at the history of Greene County schools. They haven’t had a good track record of raising student achievement.”
For his part, W. Rabun Neal, president of the Reynolds Plantation golf and lake community, looked pretty somber after the meeting, even though his proposal was approved. Despite his demeanor, he said he has high hopes that the school will draw new families — from all income levels — to a county, which has seen its public school enrollment decline.
“We want people to come back a year from now, two years from now, three years from now,” he said, “to see how successful the school is.”
Vouchers: Show Me The Money
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
State Department of Education officials have devoted a section of their Web site to the new scholarship program for disabled K-12 public school students — a.k.a. the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship.
For nearly two months, parents have been able to get information on eligibility requirements and rules that participating private schools must follow, as well as being able to submit their “intent” to seek one of the tuition vouchers.
Now, they can also find out just how much tuition the voucher will cover. Yesterday afternoon officials put up a nifty “scholarship calculator” that estimates the potential award for each individual child.
Jeff Gagne, the state official who’s overseeing the start of the program, told me there’s information on more than 184,000 special education students in the calculator. Each scholarship amount is based on what the state would pay for a specific child’s special education services in public school.
Gagne hadn’t figured the average or mean scholarship amounts yet, but he did find that the range topped out at about $15,300.
Of course, the largest scholarships will go toward those students with the most severe disabilities who have been receiving the most extensive services. But, after state lawmakers claimed the average scholarship would be about $9,000 when they were selling the program earlier this year, many parents have been banking on that figure.
I suspect when they use the calculator lots of them will be surprised at what they find.
UPDATE: On Thursday, State Board of Education members approved the list of 115 private schools that will be participating in the voucher program this coming school year. There’s an interesting mix of campuses, including loads of faith-based schools as well as schools that have long-established programs for special-needs kids, such as the Atlanta Speech School.
AYP: A ‘Second Look’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox doesn’t think all campuses should face the same penalties when they fail to make “adequate yearly progress.”
According to the press release announcing this year’s AYP report, Cox wants to see differentiated consequences, which acknowledge that some schools fare worse than others on the yearly federal yardstick.
“It is my hope that Congress will embrace the idea … so that a school that missed AYP in just one area is not treated the same as a school that missed it across the board,” she said.
Of course, most public schools don’t fail across the board. More than half of the Georgia campuses that did not make the grade this year failed because of the performance of a single student group — say, special education pupils or English language learners.
Frankly, there are so many ways for a school to make AYP — so many outs, if you will, or as state officials like to call them “second looks” — that those being flagged really must be struggling in some area. So I can’t help wondering whether these “graduated consequences” would just lead to more muddying of the AYP waters.
Just for fun, let’s say there were individualized consequences. Which would be worse: a high school that couldn’t graduate 65 percent of its students or an elementary school that couldn’t get enough pupils to pass the state reading/language arts and math exams?
AYP Is Out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
State Department of Education officials just released the annual report on which public schools have made “adequate yearly progress” this year. You can find links to all the data through the department’s press release.
A few interesting statistics immediately jumped out at me, including that nearly all (95.2 percent) of Georgia’s elementary schools are making AYP, but only two-thirds of middle schools (64.4 percent) and barely half (54.9 percent) of high schools are meeting the targets set under No Child Left Behind.
Of course, I haven’t had a chance to sift through all the information yet, so let me know if anything piques your interest.
Get Rid Of The CRCT
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I take schools’ Criterion-Referenced Competency Test scores, which the state Department of Education released this week, with a grain of salt — actually, with quite a bit of salt.
I have reviewed CRCT questions from former tests, and they are not well written. I have seen questions with two correct answers, with no correct answers and some that are so poorly written it’s hard to determine what is being asked.
From what I have seen with my children and from the conversations I have had with fellow parents, CRCT scores often do not correlate to what parents and teachers know are children’s strengths.
I am not terribly interested in knowing that my kid can regurgitate “criteria” every April like a trained dog. I do not particularly care if he knows a list of “skills” thrown together by Georgia bureaucrats.
Knowing my kid’s CRCT scores does not tell me if he has the ability to compete with children from elsewhere in the country. Norm-referenced testing, such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, is a far more informative measure that compares children to their peers.
Some testing, conducted at reasonable intervals, does provide parents and schools with valuable information. But all children do not need to be tested for five straight days in every grade for us to know how our schools and children are performing — particularly when the tests are subject to tampering at the whim of politicians who are looking to continue their careers.
Today’s guest blogger serves on the school council at Oakhurst Elementary School in Decatur. She thinks states should move to a randomized, sample testing system that takes less time and tests fewer students, but still provides a check on school quality. To be a guest blogger here, e-mail an entry on any education-related topic to bgutierrez@ajc.com.
Teacher Turnover: When Financial Incentives Don’t Work
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Cobb County is phasing out a bonus program for teachers who work in struggling schools because the 5-year-old plan apparently wasn’t working.
Instead of providing a financial incentive to stick with schools with high numbers of hard-to-teach students, Cobb teachers were leaving the campuses in droves.
According to Diane Stepp’s recent article, Floyd Middle School in Mableton had a teacher turnover rate as high as 27.9 percent in the 2005-06 school year — despite the fact that teachers there could earn salary bonuses of up to $5,000, depending on their years of service. By comparison, the average turnover rate for the system’s other schools (those not considered low-performing) was 8.5 percent.
Cobb officials are scratching their heads, trying to figure out why the program wouldn’t keep more teachers. Obviously, a number of reasons could explain the failure — poor leadership, poor facilities and resources, poor classroom support, to name a few.
But we’re talking about a specific population of schools here — schools that don’t have the cream-of-the-crop pupils or an abundance of parents who volunteer. To use another cliche: The deck is stacked against them.
With those kinds of challenges, is it any wonder teachers leave?
A Patriotic Break
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When I was 18 years old, I bought a backpack, a cheap plane ticket on Pakistan International Airlines and set off with my older sister to see Europe.
It was the first time I had traveled overseas, and one of the first things I learned was a bit of a curiosity. Everywhere we went, Canadians always displayed their flag, usually in the form of a patch on their backpacks.
Why? Well, I was told, they didn’t want to be mistaken for Americans.
This was a rude awakening — the first time I learned how much the rest of the world, or at least a good chunk of it, hated the United States.
One day, my sister and I wandered into a pizza joint just off the main square in Prague. This was the summer of 1992 and the Olympics were being broadcast on a TV inside.
My memory’s a bit cloudy, so I can’t remember exactly what part of the games we were watching. But I’ll never forget how proud I felt hearing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and watching the American flag being raised during a medal ceremony.
I can still see myself standing there, staring up at the TV, transfixed. To this day, the memory brings tears to my eyes. After weeks of being cast as the hated, ugly American, I knew — for the first time, really — what patriotism truly felt like.
Now that’s something you just can’t learn in school.
Finally, Your School’s CRCT Scores
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OK, all you nervous moms and dads: The school-level Criterion-Referenced Competency Test scores have just been released. Now you can find out how good or bad your child’s campus really did on the state’s annual standardized exams.
I haven’t looked at them yet, so let me know if you find anything interesting.
TIP: You’ve got to scroll all the way to the bottom of the State Department of Education’s press release to find the data links.
Learning To Cross The Cultural Divide
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A group of Gwinnett County teachers recently traveled more than 1,300 miles with hopes of improving their teaching of immigrant students — a growing population in the metro Atlanta area.
This wasn’t just a free summer vacation to Mexico. Rather, the trip was a learning experience that the educators now say will help them better teach and interact with their charges — including many who are emigrating from south of the U.S. border.
What I found interesting about Laura Diamond’s story was that the teachers were discovering cultural nuances that may have caused misunderstandings in their classrooms in the past.
I wonder: How many other teachers have been stymied by their inability to bridge the cultural divide?
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