Some good in new NY governor Eliot Spitzer?

Although he might be bad for business, he could be surprisingly good for kids. As Kathleen Lucadamo reported in Monday's Daily News, Spitzer, "speaking to Orthodox Jews at a Brooklyn yeshiva, said it is unjust that private schools educate 15 percent of the state's students but get only 1 percent of the education budget."

Spitzer couldn't be more right. He supports encouraging public education through private means, and is increasingly unabashed in saying so. Earlier in the year, Spitzer flipped from hazy opposition to support of what was then Governor Pataki's proposal for an education tax credit. "I support the idea of education tax credits," he claimed, though he had previously declared that "vouchers would destroy the public school system." The education tax credit at issue turned into a blanket child tax credit, but Spitzer still expresses support for the concept of education-specific tax credits. His spokeswoman Christine Anderson said this week that "if elected, Eliot will explore the feasibility of expanding such programs."

Spitzer's still no fan of vouchers, but education tax credits are emerging as both the "third way" for Democrats and the policy of choice for social conservatives seeking to send their children to religious schools and libertarians who just want more choices. Spitzer appropriated the tax credit issue from his current opponent, attorney John Faso, who sponsored the ETC bill as minority leader of the state assembly in 2001.

Education tax credits have been on the rise across the nation. In the past year, Arizona, Rhode Island, and Iowa have all passed new programs, and Pennsylvania expanded its existing business tax credit for donations to private scholarship funds. The Arizona and Iowa bills both got past Democratic governors, and the Rhode Island business tax credit came about in a legislature controlled by Democrats in both houses.

At $330 per child, the current New York tax credit is paltry, but its political implications are enormous: an ambitious Democrat has embraced education tax credits in a true-blue state. Like Bill Clinton signing on to "end welfare as we know it," the acceptance of the principle and the approach matters greatly. President Clinton didn't want to go all the way with the Republican welfare plan. But his acceptance of the conservative conception of the problem and the range of solutions moved the political center of gravity to a point that allowed their victory.

The politics of school choice is changing, too, and school-choice supporters need to take advantage of it. Supporters of school choice should take advantage of Spitzer's overtures to raise their expectations and push for educational freedom on a much more meaningful scale.

As we have seen in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and elsewhere, tiny pilot and hyper-targeted programs have served their purpose in demonstrating the effectiveness of school choice and helping a small number of students. But coverage for low-income children will expand most rapidly if a broad and politically powerful set of constituencies gets behind it, and that means the middle class. It's easier to help the disadvantaged through a program that helps everybody.

Whether their concern is for low-income children alone or for educational freedom across the board, school choice supporters need to build on the new momentum and push forward with big, broad-coverage education tax credits. With political opposition to these credits softening, New York has never had a better opportunity to bring educational choices to children.

It doesn't matter if Spitzer's support for school choice is limited: His statements have changed the game. As he heads to the governor's mansion, school-choice supporters should think big, and push him to pass broad bills that would allow all parents to choose where their children are educated.

Source





HUGE SCIENCE EDUCATION FAILURES

What causes the phases of the moon? Why do seasons change? Kids come up with the darndest answers, says Bill Weiler. He compiles lists of children's misconceptions about science for the American Institute of Physics. North Carolina State University physics professor John Hubisz found similar problems in a two-year study of middle-school science textbooks. All told, he compiled 500 pages of errors in 12 textbooks, including mix-ups between fission and fusion, incorrect definitions of absolute zero, and a map showing the equator running through the southern states.

Reporting on the ways science textbooks are developed and sold to schools, Forbes writer David McClintick says many companies "churn out rubbish" with countless errors. One widely adopted text, for instance, claims the earth rotates around the sun, when it actually revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis.

But textbook companies are reluctant to change blatant errors, even when renowned scientists submit long lists of corrections. Astrophysicist and schoolteacher Leonard Tramiel, testifying before California's Curriculum Commission, an 18-member panel that approves textbooks, reported finding 30 errors in the first 100 pages of one science book. The company corrected only three mistakes, leaving a book rife with errors that, if approved, could be used for six years or more in California classrooms and in other states.

As school started this year, I took Hubisz advice to "borrow a middle-school science text and randomly open it up." I immediately saw his point that texts often present important concepts in a clutter of cartoon-like graphics. Some errors were glaring, and the short blocks of print, written at a low reading level, glossed over explanations.

Can science teachers change students' misconceptions? The answer is yes, but only if teachers are competent, patient, and willing to do more than cover the curriculum and coach students on test questions. University of Dallas physicist Richard Olenick urges teachers to blend good science and artful instruction to help students "make connections between what they learn in science classrooms and what they already know." He says it's possible to change students' preconceptions by cultivating curiosity about important concepts, such as gravity and density; building new understanding piece by piece; and helping students see the errors in their thinking.

Joseph Stepans, science education specialist at the University of Wyoming, says students need many opportunities -- not just one -- to "replace their naive ideas about natural phenomena with scientifically accepted concepts." In Targeting Students' Science Misconceptions, he urges teachers to check students' prior knowledge through interviews, group discussions, journal writing, and illustrations. At the National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science, based at the University of Wisconsin, director Thomas Carpenter and his co-researchers recently completed an eight-year study on teaching practices that help students "learn with understanding." Carpenter says students' scientific (and mathematic) understanding emerges when teachers engage students in four ways of thinking:

* Constructing relationships: Students relate new ideas to ones they already understand.
* Extending and applying knowledge: Students apply new concepts to solve unfamiliar problems.
* Justifying and explaining generalizations and procedures: Students think like scientists and mathematicians to test the validity of key ideas.
* Making knowledge personal: Students strive to understand emerging concepts as they work and study in groups and teams, much like real scientists

Carpenter says the best way to improve science teaching and learning involves training teachers to understand scientific concepts, practicing scientific inquiry the way real scientists investigate problems, confronting their own scientific reasoning and misconceptions, and generating and demonstrating scientific understanding.

About a year ago I discovered Carpenter's recommendations at work in a California elementary school. Until recently, science lessons at San Diego County's Jefferson Elementary School were mostly lackluster worksheets. But a school partnership with the San Diego Natural History Museum has transformed science by using a local watershed -- where water drains from mountains to the Pacific Ocean -- as a "broad learning canvas." To begin, the museum provided teachers with 32 hours of training in applied field biology and ecology, curriculum standards pertaining to water-related studies, and technology skills such as digital photography and data graphics. Then toxicologists, botanists, and hydrologists had the teachers don boots and backpacks and venture into a nearby canyon to learn about water quality, water conservation, and erosion, topics they'd soon be teaching to fourth- to sixth-graders.

But the teachers still had to prove their scientific understanding. In the third stage of training, they completed the same performance assessments they'd designed for their students -- presentations of scientific principles using examples from their own photographs, charts, and other data. The impact of teacher training shows up in the ways students now learn science. Instead of completing a steady stream of worksheets, kids use scientific fieldwork techniques to identify and eradicate invasive plants in the watershed and study microorganisms in water samples. In the classroom, they chart water levels on spreadsheets, and at the end of the year they present their research in the school auditorium.

The transformation in science shows up in the school's achievement scores. When the school-museum partnership began in 2001, overall Academic Performance Index scores were 574; now they're over 750. Scores for Hispanic and ESL students, the fastest growing segment of Jefferson's population, have risen from 492 to 689. Once cited as an underperforming school, Jefferson is now a California Distinguished School.

Georgia's Pinson says she's learned that her students need adequate time and repeated opportunities to observe and try out science principles and theories. And they need to spend more time on experiments and hands-on activities and less time on textbooks and worksheets. Teachers, she says, need to unpack kids' prior knowledge and develop lessons that specifically target their misconceptions. It's impossible to predict if Pinson's 9-year-olds will revert to their childlike misconceptions when they're 19 or 49, but for now her students are listening to one another, volunteering information and ideas, cooperating on projects and experiments, and, with help from a patient and caring teacher, working hard to learn good science. It's a good start.

Source

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

***************************