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December 2009 We at NCSE hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, with much to be grateful for! In our Feature article you can read about a program that a group of high-achieving, low-income students can be grateful for; it’s a mentoring program run by
My guess is that all my readers have a place – and probably a nice one – to call home. As we head into the holiday giving season, read the Duffield and Lovell report entitled The Economic Crisis Hits Home, linked in our Resources section, to learn about the shocking increase in homeless students. You can probably make donations to assist them by contacting the homeless student liaison in your school district. Newsletter Editor |
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Closing the Gap: by Laura Mortimer
Elliot ranks in the top five percent of his class at a well-known private academy in Darrell attends PS 382 in the Bronx, rises at 5:30 every morning to make breakfast and lunch for himself and his two younger sisters (mom left for work at five, and dad’s not around), and walks six blocks to catch the train to school by 6:45. After school he goes to his job at the gas station, where he works until nine o’clock Monday through Friday, and eight hours on Saturday. Despite the fact that no one in his family has ever gone to college, he is determined to do so. He regularly studies late into the night and has maintained good grades throughout high school. Scoring a 31 on the ACT was a huge accomplishment. The admissions representative, however, does not know that Elliot has benefited from years of private tutoring or that Darrell is lucky to get five hours of sleep on weeknights. Unless the Though the achievement gap between rich and poor has decreased in recent years thanks to countless programs and initiatives, it is still appalling. Several top colleges and universities have tried to address this problem by maintaining need blind admissions. My alma mater, By partnering with Questbridge, a non-profit designed to assist low-income students applying for college, the Amherst Tele-mentoring program finds low-income academic achievers like Darrell. Additionally, Questbridge offers a National College Match program, which matches high-achieving, low-income students with top colleges of their choice and helps streamline the application process. Schools that participate in the Questbridge Match program pay careful attention to Questbridge applicants, for they understand these students have all achieved academic excellence in the face of adversity. If, for example, Darrell had participated in the Questbridge Match program, he could have received help from an Though Amherst and Questbridge both provide wonderful services for low-income students with great potential, those students have done the vast majority of the work on their own. They decided early on that college was a must and found ways to make good grades and high test scores amidst considerable adversity. Ideally, students would have Tele-mentor figures from an early age to make college completion the goal of every child. Still, colleges and universities should pay close attention to the challenges their applicants have faced, and make admissions decisions accordingly. |
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Student-led Conferences by Jodi Heilbrunn School personnel, frustrated with failed attempts to boost parent involvement, frequently ask NCSE what in the world they can do to get parents involved with their children’s education and with the school. While they hope for year-round involvement, they report struggling even to get parents to show up for parent-teacher conferences. Parents and educators alike consider these conferences crucial, yet we all secretly – or not so secretly – dread them. Children hate knowing they are being talked about, parents worry about what they will hear, and teachers worry about what they will say and how they will sooth their subsequent laryngitis. Traditionally, hoards of parents clog school halls waiting in lines that rival those of inner city soup kitchens; the payoff is a thin porridge of grades-behavior-attitude-thank-you-goodnight dished out in five to ten minutes. Since it can take three or four hours to hear from one child’s teachers, imagine being a single parent with two or more children! And the poor teachers face unending lines of parents who are already irritated by the time they say hello. It’s no wonder many parents just don’t bother. The good news? There is an alternative. More and more schools are replacing traditional parent/teacher conferences with “student-led conferences” in which students, not teachers, report to parents on their work. Students are given a checklist of things they must include in their presentation, including their greatest accomplishments in each class and areas in which they need improvement. They must prepare rigorously for the conference, organizing a portfolio of their work, making sure they address each item in the checklist, and practicing their presentation. Parents receive their children’s self-evaluations along with teacher evaluations. There are advantages for all parties. For students, the conference is an active learning experience in which they practice public speaking and take responsibility for their own work – or lack thereof! Parents generally attend just one longer conference, by appointment, in which they hear about their children’s work in all classes. They can peruse their children’s portfolios at their leisure afterward. (Usually only one teacher attends each conference, so parents should be invited to make appointments with other teachers if they have a concern.) Teachers must do more prep work, but they oversee fewer conferences and their job is mostly to be quiet and provide minimal direction to assist students. Lastly, everyone benefits because parents are far more likely to attend one significant presentation their child has worked to develop, than hours of frustration in traditional conferences. One school reported an increase in conference attendance from 20% to 90%!
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The
Fundsnet Services lists grants in 28 categories. The Education and Literacy Grants category currently has 217 grants listed.
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Center for Public Education. (February 11, 2009.) Better late than never? Examining late high school graduates.
Largely due to the economic and housing crises, many school districts across the country report increases in the number of homeless students in the classroom. This report describes the sobering findings of a survey of schools conducted during the fall of 2008 by the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth and First Focus. This report shows how governors can implement four strategies to increase high school graduation rates in their states: 1) Promote High School Graduation for All; 2) Target Youth At Risk of Dropping Out; 3) Reengage Youth Who Have Dropped Out of School; and 4) Provide Rigorous, Relevant Options for Earning a High School Diploma.
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K-12 Conference Website: This is an on-line listing for many types of conferences, with K-12 Education Conferences selected as a sub-category.
National School Board Association Conference
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